Sarge to Etch via Knoppix Lilo. Any hope of recovery?

I tried to upgrade from Sarge to Etch but didn't reconfigure my lilo or upgrade my kernel first before rebooting(I know, bad idea). When rebooted, I got the dreaded loading "Li" and that's it.

I figured out that Lilo was broken so I got the latest version of Knoppix (rescue disk) and copied the Lilo from it back to my machine. It'll now boot and run almost normally, but I can't update anything. I need to update my kernel and glibc but apt-get and aptitude just cut out with every attempt (even apt-get -f install doesn't work). I get all sorts of dependancy errors I belive are mainly based on glibc needing to be updated.

Am I hosed or is it still possible to update the kernel without losing everything on the partition by wiping it and starting over? I've gone into the rescue mode of the Debian disks and get to "partitioning the drives" but can't get the flag to come up that they won't be formatted.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!
-Josh Rosenbaum