Comment 81 for bug 249340

After an upgrade of 7.10 to 8.04 I had the same error. I booted into recovery menu, dropped to root and did this:
apt-get update && apt-get - u dist-upgrade.
well, it sort of continued for a while even doing all the locales and some other packages but eventually aborted with a 'too many errors' message and stated that dpkg was interrupted and should be run manually , so then i ran this:
(as root user)
dpkg --configure -a
this got it a bit further along but eventually after upgrading many packages? it aborted again., so at this point I typed 'exit' to return to the recovery menu, and now selected the resume normal boot option and although very very slow it eventually actually showed the graphical ubuntu logon screen. How do I continue with a full recovery to fix the still broken apps/pacages? Any help appreciated. Please provide exact instructions.