Good morning,

After the updates galore of yesterday in -current, I began to update my system using slackpkg. However, after upgrading the kernel packages, I had a power problem and the system went down. (I had run lilo first, before the blackout happened) Upon powering it on again, my system won't boot. The kernel loads, and then init takes control, but when it comes to the regular fsck, the boot halts with a big, scary warning message that the filesystem might have an error and libblkid.so.1 is missing.

Be advised that the packages in the big update of yesterday were installed on alphabetical order. An inspection on the Jan 25-updated version of Slackware-current on my laptop reveals that the library in question is part of e2fsprogs. That's odd; if there was an update for it, it should already have been installed, but the system complains that a file from that package is missing, anyway.

All this boils down to: my system is now unusable, unable to boot, and I really don't have a clue on what to do.

Any help or hints that might be useful will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Use the Slackware install disc, and rescue the system.
You can run e2fsck from the install environment, install packages, perhaps chroot in if your system is stable enough.

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt

Had a similar problem not too long ago, but instead of a blackout it was a mischievous cat and bad laptop battery
I keep 6 rsync'd mirrors on our file server (32/64 stable, 32/64 -current, 32/64 -current -1). Boot the install disc, obtain an IP (dhcpcd eht0), chroot in, mount nfs share, and proceed to repair.

In fact the technique worked, and I was able to continue the upgrade. Thanks!