Booting debian standalone?

[Dan Coutu]

Mansur, Warren wrote:

>>I see that when rebooting I get a 5 second window to hit 
>>Enter and get a 
>>shell. But it
>>is a very lightweight shell with next to nothing for commands 
>>available. 
>>I have to use
>>echo just to get a directory listing! Can I at this point get 
>>the system 
>>to come up in single
>>user mode? There seems to be no lilo or grub on the thing.
>>    
>>
>
>If you can get to a shell, then type 'init 1' to enter single user mode. From there, type 'init 3' to enter multi-user mode without starting X. 'init 5' starts multi-user mode with X.
>
>  
>
No can do. There is no init command at this point. The available 
commands are:
ash, sh, echo, sleep, insmod, and modprobe. That's not a lot to work 
with here.

Dan