Comment 8 for bug 283942

in case other people have the same problem and read this, I would like to contribute here how I did proceed with my installation to recover from the problem:
- repeatedly called dpkg --configure -a until it succeeded
  (better would be to first edit /var/cache/debconf/config.dat as described in bug 270626)
- edit /etc/lsb-release and /etc/apt/sources.list back to hardy
- download and unpack http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/intrepid.tar.gz
- call ./intrepid