OK, so there I was, thinking I was getting the hang of linux, and then Igo and do something monumentally stupid!

Well, I have installed slackware on an ancient laptop, and found gnome too slow, so I installed fvwm instead. then I altered my rc.4 file, putting fvwm at the top, and in a moment of brilliance editted out all the others, thinking that if it didn't load it would default to the command line, and I'b be able to edit it in vi again. THEN I decided to edit the inittab file to boot 4 instead of 3, again with the same logic. I rebooted, you can guess what happened! cannot find file- cannot load- yadayadayada and then it didn't give me the command line!

I tried to boot from a floppy, using bare.i and then mounting /dev/hda3 (on which root is) but of cource this used the inittab file and did the same as before. so what I'm asking is this - how can I boot just the command line and vi (or any other editor) off of a floppy, or get the comp to use a inittab file off of the boot floppy? I've looked around but every site I look at talks about booting off the HDD from the floppy (tried) or off the CD-rom (the laptop doesn't have one). HELP!!!!

You can try to pass 'init=/bin/bash' to the kernel in LILO/GRUB. If you use text mode lilo, it means to type 'linux init=/bin/bash' at LILO boot prompt.