etch to lenny upgrade incomplete

[BartlebyScrivener <bscrivener42@gmail.com>]

I use stable etch on my work machine, but decided to try dist-upgrade
from etch to lenny on a machine I don't need so much.

I changed etch to lenny in my sources list. The packages seemed to
download okay, but during installation or configuration, when it got
to hald . . . (configuring or installing) it just hung there for 10 or
20 minutes.

I rebooted. The new kernel stopped with:

VFS cannot open root device "sdb1" or unknown block (0,0)  Please
append a correct "root=" boot option; here are available partitions.

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS unable to mount root fs on unknown
block.

I can boot into the other, older kernel but many things are broken. If
I try to go into Synaptic, it says I need to dpkg --configure -a.
When I do that, it says:

Setting up ssl-cert (1.0.15)

and just hangs there.

What next? Can I simply do dist-upgrade again and see if it sticks the
second time?

Thanks for any help.

RD