Force boot to cli on startup
 

I have a fubar'd Squeeze VM that displays a blank black screen on startup. Loader is grub, and the VM is running on Xen XCP 1.1.0, connected via XenCenter 6.0. VM ran fine until I did some hacking and set the resolution obviously too high. Is there a key sequence I can press that will boot to the command line? I've tried Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, "e", to no avail.

Hi,

the grub menu should give you an option to boot into "recovery mode" which will just give you a shell.

Evo2.

Just pass the runlevel you want (3) as a kernel boot option. You should have a boot menu which will probably be grub based, if you see something with a countdown timer when you boot that will be it, you need to press [tab] or [a] to modify the arguments - just add ' 3' at the end and press [enter].

Hi,

You do realise this is the Debian forum right? By default run level 3 will be the same as the default runlevel (which is 2).

Evo2.

No I didn't notice :) .. just searched for zero reply posts

F12
 

I was able to press F12 and get boot choices ,but no option to load a shell.

Hi,

that sounds like your bios menu. You have to wait until you see the grub screen, then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to select a kernel to boot.

Evo2.

Can you CTRL+ALT+F1 to a virtual terminal? If you can then kill xorg from there.

No not the bios, here is a screenshot of what I get when I press F12.

@caravel, I tried CTRL+ALT+F1 after pressing 2 with no luck.

If you have a live distro;

edit /etc/rc3.d, remove S18lightdm, then edit /etc/inittab, change id:2:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault:

Reboot & you should now boot into a shell on your system.

Just change initdefault back to 2 when you are finished sorting out X.

Shouldn't that be gdm3 instead of lightdm on a Debian system?

Squeeze still has Gnome 2, so if the Op has Gnome or XFCE, it is probably gdm2. It could also be kdm if using the KDE CD and with LXDE ... ?

Sorry, I just used my system as a reference, I'm on Wheezy/XFCE, so yes, it probably is gdm if running Gnome.

The main point being to disable/remove what is starting up X from one of the init levels & to use that to get in.

Hi,

that is not Debian it appears to be the virtual machines equivalent to the bios boot device menu.
In you first post you explicitly said you are using grub.

Evo2.