After breaking a couple of my Centos 5.2 test servers trying out fdisk, I would like to fix them. They don't boot anymore. When I boot up with the LiveCD, I get the normal login prompt but only for a second. It logs in as the "centos" user and goes directly to the GUI environment.

All I want is command line. Should I use a CD for a different distro? I just read that ubuntu has a LiveCD that lets u in to use fdisk.

What should I boot with to access/edit my partitions using fdisk? Knoppix I tried but it doesn't work, any menu selection results in a reboot. Thanks!

So what?

You can start a terminal and do your fdisk work

The live cd is using the RAM only.

The best thing will be to use partedmagic
or the systemrescue cd

Or you can open a terminal and run:to use CLI.

The network interface doesn't seem to come online when i boot the machine with the Live CD. Once it boots and goes into the gui - bypassing the regular login, my display options are all screwed up so I can't use the gui. I can kind of see it, so I managed to open Applications >> Terminal but when I type init 1 or init 3 nothing happens. (there's an error message in the terminal that I can't read because the default display settings are loaded from the Live CD, incompatible with my display)

If I logout of the LiveCD gui, it logs me out - but then starts right back up. No CLI access. All i need to use is vi!

Did you try Ctrl-Alt-F2 to see if you can get a CLI?

Extreme thanks goes to bathory for that reply. Exactly what I needed.

CTRL+ALT+F2 effectively gets you out of X Windows into CLI

Usually you will use the CentOS installation CD/DVD with the "rescue" kernel parameter to do any rescue operations.

This will boot you directly to a rescue shell where - by chance - your old system gets already recognized.

I think this would speed up your system restauration...