re-installing Debian

[Glenn at home]

First of all, I wanted to mention here that I was going through some of the 
messages I have saved since I first installed Debian, and it is wonderful 
how I have gotten so much help from this list, even though it seems that I 
still have a lot to learn.

I have been trying to fix my broken Debian since I really messed it up with 
a failed attempt at upgrading.
I did:
apt-get dist-upgrade
and now I get a kernel panic: attempt to kill init
and above that it reads:
modprobe error invalid line 237 in init.conf
or something like that.
And I have looked at line 237, and even tried remming it out, with # and it 
still does not work.

I know someone who was going to try and log on with SSH, but he cannot get 
through my router.
So it seems that that option is out.

So I was wondering if I can just re-install Debian without losing my files 
in /home/ftp/etc/pub?
Thanks for any ideas.
Glenn