Daniel B. Thurman
b) After the second time I re-installed from scratch, grub came up find with the splash screen and all that, but then when I came to figuring out how to modify grub to boot runlevel 3, it was (and still is) not possible to me to figure out this step. Please reply and tell me how this one is done please so that I know how? Of course this would be the easiest place to get into runlevel 3 and yum update and my problems could have been MUCH easier.
Jim Cornette:
Basically, press a key to unhide the menu when grub displays. Then you would highlight the kernel you desired and press the "a" key to display the boot line. You would want to backspace out the "rhgb quiet" portion of the line out, then add a spacebar followed by the number 3. Press enter and you should be booting into runlevel 3. Login at the terminal (root of course), you should be in runlevel 3.
I can see that a good option would be for the initial installation to have two GRUB entries for the first kernel.
1. Normal boot. 2. Reduced level boot.
It might make things easier the first time around.