Messed it up already

[Nate Birkholz]

I downloaded YDL 2.3 to give it a try and see if I want to buy 3.0. I
installed on a Mac Powerbook G3 1999 400Mhz (Lombard) with an upgraded hard
drive and oodles of RAM. The system is currently configured to have two
boots, OS 9 and Linux, with Linux the primary boot.

Everything went well for the first day, then I messed up my video settings
by increasing the bit depth to 32, apparently a no-no with the Lombard and
Linux.

What happens now is that it finishes the boot sequence, attempts to display
the graphical user login, and the screen flickers for a few minutes. Then,
eventually, it fail to the command prompt and displays the message,

  INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

then sits at a prompt. I ca navigate around the system with unix commands
but cannot effect much change. I should note that my unix command-line
experience is almost nil.

I have researched this problem in the YDL mailing-list archives and have
found a few solutions.

Unfortunately, the solutions all require me to be able to edit files on my
hard drive, and the files are all 'read only" for me when in this situation.
I need to be able to have root-user access to the files, but cannot seem to
get root-user access.

If I use "sudo", the password is not accepted because I have not been set up
as a root user:

  nate is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

and the root password I specified at installation is useless at the command
line. Of course, I cannot add nate to the sudoers file of course because it
is write protected. I tried to use visudo, but typing visudo results in the
error message:

  bash: visudo: command not found

I see many messages about rebooting and starting in "single-user mode", but
I cannot find step-by-step instructions on how to actually do this with
yaboot. The instructions I do find say to enter "[kernel number] single" but
don't say how to find the kernel number, nor how to get to the prompt where
I type this, since yaboot starts with a menu asking me for one of three
choices. 

Reinstalling would be possible and even easy. However, I'd rather fix it
instead of starting over, since I learn more by fixing it.

So can anyone please help me?

-- 
Nate Birkholz
Minneapolis, Minnesota