How can i force interactive startup in RHEL4 pressing I does not work tried it a zillion time

You only have a fraction of a second to hit the 'I' key, unless you modify /etc/rc.d/rc.sysint. Edit the file and add a '/bin/sleep 5' after the message.

I really hope you're joking, acemoneta.
I've got an error during my file system check, because I messed up the LVM settings. The result is that I can't edit the sysinit (mounted readonly). So as far as I can tell I have to catch that millisecond and hit I. In my opinion it's idiotic that it doesn't wait at least 1 full second for this. But I'm in a bad mood, so...

Alternatively, does someone know how to remove a physical volume from an LVM on the command line? the utilities in the LVM guide I found
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/commontask.html
are pretty much all returning

"Locking type 1 initialisation failed"

I'm in deep doodoo if I don't get my system back soon.