How to get out of runlevel 5 in an emergency?

[Chris G]

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.

-- 
Chris Green