Getting to a console at runlevel 5

[Jonathan Singer]

Thanks! Actually, after some more fiddling, I was able to boot into single-user mode by just passing "linux single" to the boot prompt. Documentation had caused me to think there had to be an semicolon in there and I couldn't get it to work.

The underlying problem turned out to be fairly simple so single-user was enough to fix it. But your plan would be very useful in cases where more testing of X had been necessary. Again, thanks!
 

>From: Stefan Bruda <bruda@ubishops.ca>
>At 12:31 -0500 on 2002-10-28 Jonathan Singer wrote:
> >
> > I broke something in X, and booting in runlevel 5 gets to an unusable
> > screen. I can't get to a virtual console and am wondering what the next best
> > way is to get to a text-only screen from which I can start troubleshooting.
>
>Boot from the rescue CD (aka "Tasty morsels").  Press Enter ar the
>boot prompt.  Then mount your / --you know where it is, right?
>Assuming that / is /dev/hda5, do
>
>    mount /dev/hda5 /root
>
>Then cd to /root and you are on your file systems.  In particular,
>your inittab is now /root/etc/inittab and you can edit it, no problem,
>vi at least should be available.