Booting with GRUB

I had to boot Linux into Single user mode. It is not obvious how to do this. This information comes from the Red Hat Linux 7.2 Bible, by Christopher Negus. The publisher is Hungry Minds.

When you turn the machine on, you can either select the system you want to boot, or you can wait for the default. This gives you the standard boot. If you want to do a non-standard boot, you must edit the boot process.

Select the kernel image you want booted, and hit the letter e. You will see something like the following on your screen...

GRUB version 0.90 (639K lower / 65530K upper memory

root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.43.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda3 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img

There are some help notes immediately after this that I don't feel like typing in. The above notes from from the Linux Bible, not from my Red Hat 7.3 laptop. I also cannot remember the value for upper memory.

The only line you should modify is the kernel one, which selects the boot image.

Position the cursor on the kernel line and press e.

To boot in single user mode, add the text linux 1.

Hit the letter b to boot the machine.