System crashes after Update Pack 6

[Fornhamfred]

I am running LMDE 64 and after installing update pack 6 today my system did not shut down. Upon rebooting it gets as far as cleaning up temporary files
/tmp/lib/init/rw and then freezes. It does the same in recovery mode. I have three kernel versions and trying to boot each has the same result.

Just prior to this it gives

initctl Unknown parameter: devname

Is it possible to boot the system say from grub and re-install the update?

As I have had no response I have re-installed and after a download which was very slow and continually reported that not all packages had been downloaded I eventually succeeded.

I can only assume that not all packages were downloaded the first time and this caused the initial problems.

I have never had problems with previous packs and will next time make sure that I make a backup copy before attempting any update.