install-info can't lock dir for editing

[crawford@dragnet.seagull.net (goingware.com)]

I had a system freeze while I was in the process of upgrading
lots of packages to woody r0, with massive filesystem corruption
in /, /usr and /var.

I think it would be helpful if apt did a sync after downloading
each file and dpkg also did a sync after installing each one.  It's
happened to me a couple times that I've had crashes during upgrades
and because of all the activity in important filesystems its always
been a big mess to recover.

Anyway, I get lots of errors using dselect or dpkg.  I have found
that some of my important files got their blocks switched to
some other random file.  For example, /usr/lib/libdb3.so.3 turned
into a text file full off typesetting information.

What I've been doing is manually ftp'ing the packages that seem
real messed up from ftp.us.debian.org, and then using dpkg -i
to manually reinstall them.  This mostly works.

But I've still got a couple hundred packages in my 
/var/cache/apt/archives to install.  I get various errors when I
try to install them.  One significant one goes approximately like
this:

install-info: can't lock dir for editing! no such file or directory

I found that install-info was part of dpkg, so I manually reinstalled
dpkg (!) but that didn't effect it.

Any idea what could be going on?  Either an important file is
corrupted, or the packages I'm trying to isntall are corrupted,
or the filesystem where install-info is trying to create a lock is
corrupted and preventing the lock.

I have run fsck many times, at some point it turned up clean (although
I have found lots of files whose contents were obviously bogus).

I'm considering reformatting and reinstalling, but that's a lengthy
procedure.

This is on a PowerPC G4 Mac 8500 attempting to upgrade to woody r0.

For arcane reasons, you cannot email me at the address that this
message will have.  Either reply to the list or to me at
crawford@goingware.com

Thanks,

Mike
crawford@goingware.com