Dapper to Edgy hosed my Ubuntu install!

Not a good day for me in tech.
I did a quick search about how to upgrade from one version to the next, and found

gksu "update-manager -c"

This brings up a secret upgade button in Ubuntu's updater. So away I went, from a nicely working 6.04 into 6.1.
The download and upgrade took several hours to complete- I left it running overnight.
Several times the installer asked me if I wanted to upgrade some config file, so I said yes, go ahead.
After rebooting, it wouldn't start up. It just hung at the splash screen, waiting for the root filesystem.
What now? Off to Altavista for some answers. One suggestion was to try the x386 kernel instead of the x686.
Still no good.
I booted off my Fiesty CD. How to run a directory check on the internal hard drive? This is definitely not like OS X. By this I mean I was in big trouble. Up the creek without a paddle. I fooled around with fsck and it said something about a problem with the superblock.
Oh well. There wasn't much data on there to worry about, just a few downloads that can be done again, like Skype, Opera, Google Earth, Flash Player, Xcfe, Fluxbox and so on.
Because Ubuntu does not make it easy to upgrade from a CD-ROM without modifying the sources.list text file to point to your CD, I had to format it and install a clean Fiesty.
The upgrade to Gutsy went a lot more smoothly.

Oh, and the other reason it was a bad tech day; I couldn't log in to an OpenID-enabled site, productwiki.com, with my OpenID. The error was, "You don't own that identity". Oh yes I do.