Upgrade of Breezy to Dapper failed

Machine: HP6545C, P3 500MHz, 256M ram, 6G hd. Had only Breezy, installed from your disk. I went to the net to upgrade to Dapper, and got a message to report this bug to you. Here are the details:
  in window with red-disc-with-white-bar, boldface text: Could not install 'var/cache/apt/archives/coreutils_5.93-5ubuntu4_i386.deb'
  then in ordinary type: The upgrade aborts now. Please report this bug.
  then in a sub-window: subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 2

Underneath this is a window entitled Upgrading Ubuntu
 boldface heading: Upgrading to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
   (check mark) Preparing the upgrade
   (check mark) Modifying the software channels
   (green ball) (boldface) Downloading and installing the upgrades
   (no decorations) Cleaning up
                              Restarting the system
Progress bar about 1/3 filled in, About 1 hours 42 minutes remaining
(italic) Preparing coreutils

Here are the last bits of text from the terminal window:

Preparing to replace sysv-rc 2.86.ds1-1.1ubuntu6 (using .../sysv-rc_2.86.ds1-6ubuntu32_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement sysv-rc ...
Setting up sysv-rc (2.86.ds1-6ubuntu32) ...

(Reading database ... 62176 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace coreutils 5.2.1-2ubuntu2 (using .../coreutils_5.93-5ubuntu4_i386.deb) ...
Removing `local diversion of /usr/share/man/man1/md5sum.textutils.1.gz to /usr/share/man/man1/md5sum.textutils.1.gz'
dpkg-divert: rename involves overwriting `/usr/share/man/man1/md5sum.textutils.1.gz' with
  different file `/usr/share/man/man1/md5sum.1.gz', not allowed
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/opt/archives/coreutils_5.93-5ubuntu4_i386.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encounteredwhile processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/coreutils_5.93-5ubuntu4_i385.deb
dapper: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server :0.0

(All this stuff was copied by hand, so there may be some typos. CMcC)