oops! need help!

[Jonathan DuBois <soibudde yahoo com>]

I did something foolish.  I have/had an lx164 running 
redhat 5.1 with kernel 2.2.10 and glibc 2.0.6.  I have
been wanting to upgrade to glibc 2.1.3 for some time
now but I hoped to be able to do it without doing a
full upgrade to redhat 6.2.  After some botched
attempts at compiling it (glibc) myself I decided to 
try to upgrade just glibc with the RPM from redhat.
rpm -U glibc-2.1.3-16.alpha
 failed dependancies so I did
rpm -U --nodeps glibc-2.1.3-16.alpha   // oops!
it copied the new libc files to /lib/  and created
all the symlinks and stuff but died at some point.
After that things stopped working..  duh..
I decided to reboot.  //oops
at this point I couldnt log in in multiuser mode 
so I rebooted into single user mode.
things seemed pretty ok.  I tried to install the old
version of glibc I was using before: 
rpm -U --oldversion glibc-2.0.7-29.alpha
"failed..  glibc-2.0.7-29 already installed"
it seemed like the rpm package database was messed up
so I tried to rebuild the database.
This failed with an error about running out of disk
space.
Unfortunately, at this point stuff like commands like
ls stopped working.  
I rebooted once more and got a kernel panic:  //oops! 

"cant find init.. try specifying init=..."  

So, I decided to hunt down a 6.2 cdrom and try the
upgrade after all.  I managed to get hold of one and
everything went fine using the GUI form until I
selected upgrade.
then the installation program tries to rebuild the
package database and that fails with a 
'possibly out of disk space error' and the installer
freezes up.  I tried again with the expert and text
flags but I got the same error and didnt see what I
could do next.

basically I dont know how or if I can even look to see
if there really is a drive space problem.  I seriously
doubt there is but I dont know what else to do at this
point.

Please help with any advice -- I really need it!

thanks,
Jonathan 


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