blank screen after boot-up after failed upgrade

[blittle2 at nyc.rr.com]

Boot up issue after failed upgrade
Hello,

I have a Dell Laptop Inspiron 1501 AMD 64 Athlon X2 system that dual boots Ubuntu 8.04 and Windoze.

Here is what happened:

Decided to upgrade to 8.10, (the plan was to proceed to subsequent upgrades so I can get to Ubuntu 9.10 when released) I stupidly had the laptop running on battery at the time the upgrade was unpackaging and installing then the laptop died. Upon boot up, I get the following after grub:

[ 0.004000] Aperture beyond 4GB. Ignoring.
[ 0.024001] ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
[ 0.520167] Kernel panic - not synching: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Later, I went into grub and chose one of the recovery modes and told Ubuntu to fix broken packages and it began to proceed with the broken packages and installation. This seemed to fix the startup issue which I think was just hangin at the error messages I posted earlier. Now I'm able to log in, however the system hangs on a blank desktop and never shows the gui. Just a mouse arrow.