[ale] Controlling Boot

[yahoo at jimpop.com (Jim Popovitch)]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Jim Moore <d2ove4deb at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Through a series of geriatric misadventures I trashed my installation of
>  Etch on my laptop.
>  It will only start at a black screen terminal login (runlevel 3)?
>  <StartX>  gives me a message that the X11 files are screwed up.  When I
>  do a shutdown I see that "hald" also didn't start.
>  What I would like to do is a step by step startup so I can see what's
>  loading successfully and what's failing.
>  Can I hold down Ctrl or Alt and accomplish this or is there some other way.

When your PC is booting, you should see an oppty to press ESC to pause
Grub.   Press ESC, and select "(recovery mode)" which will allow you
to boot into single user mode and see all the boot debug errors scroll
across the screen.

-Jim P.