I'm using Slack 9.1 and I have a problem.

I accidentally overfilled the hard drive running an OOo install. Now I can't boot. Inittab is set to go to runlevel 5 at boot, but when it starts the X server, I get this message:

"GDM could not write to your authorisation file. This could mean that you are out of disk space or that your home directory could not be opened for writing. In any case, it is not possible to log in. Please contact your systems administrator."

And in my case, the partition IS full. What's worse is I cannot enter any commands into the terminal after I get this error, and I can't do anything to stop it from trying to enter runlevel 5 at boot time.

I have tried using the boot floppy I made when I installed Slack, but that also tries to boot to runlevel 5.

What else should I do?

When you are booting slackware, do you have a prompt that says "Press 'I' for interactive startup" or anything like that? If so, I believe you can keep it from opening X that way.

Unfortunately, no. I think it's strange that Slack doesn't have that feature, but I can't find any kind of interactive startup option like I've seen on Fedora or Mandrake.

I would suggest getting a Knoppix CD and booting with that, then mount your Slack partition during the Knoppix session and edit the mounted /etc/inittab to runlevel 3. If at all possible, mount any partition that has some extra space and move some files out of /home, too, while you're at it.

Hope this helps.