Comment 4 for bug 441367

Had the same issue with an upgrade (using kpackagekit) from jaunty to karmic (final). I had had issues with the installer b/c of acpi functions and had to reboot in amidst upgrade. After rebook my / and swap would not mount. Fiddled around, got it them to mount (in an emergency shell). Ran apt-get dist-upgrade, which told me to do dpkg --configure -a, which I did, and then after that at least I could get into kde ( it's a kubuntu system). After some updates, including some udev libraries I was still running into the inotify message. Tried:

   dpkg-reconfigure initramfs-tools

and that did the trick.

hope that helps!