How to get out of runlevel 5 in an emergency?

[Manuel Aróstegui]

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 14:18 +0100, Chris G wrote:
> I had a problem with my Fedora system at work today which required
> that I get to a root console login to fix it.  The fault (simply a
> network change elsewhere) prevented the system from booting as it
> couldn't mount some necessary NFS drives.
> 
> How is one supposed to revert to runlevel 3 (or even 2) to overcome
> this sort of problem?  Is there a grub/boot parameter one can use to
> change the runlevel?
> 
> I had to resort to using an installation CD in rescue mode to change
> /etc/inittab, I was then able to boot in runlevel 2, see what was
> wrong and fix it (just an /etc/hosts change in the end).
> 
> This seems a rather difficult way to fix what was actually a rather
> trivial fault.
> 

Yes, you can do it.

Just add the number of the runlevel you want to boot in at the end of
the line, something like this should do the trick:

kernel /whatever/vmlinuz ro root=/your/hdisk 3

Hope this helps
Manuel.