Kdesktop_lock error during 8.10 Upgrade

[scribbles]

I walked away from my PC today after starting the version upgrade via synaptic. I left it alone for a few hours knowing there was over a gig of data to be downloaded and when I came back I could hear my hard drive writing furiously but when I entered my password into the screensaver lock I got an error telling me that authentication failed and I needed to manually kill "kdesktop_lock". I of course am unable to kill the process and I don't want to reboot my computer during this process. Should I just wait it out and assume its going to reboot at the end of it? If I reboot now is it going to be able to pick up where it left off? What should I do? :confused:

[scribbles]

I rebooted and ended up with the Kernel Panic cannot mount root fs error that a couple people have already posted about. Booting to Live CD to check whether the grub lst can be edited as suggested.