Booting debian standalone?

[Mansur, Warren]

> >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.

So the question is, what is booting? If it boots at all, there must be something running the boot process, which will be either lilo or grub unless something other thing was installed. If lilo, then holding left-shift lets you type options, and if grub, then press spacebar, at which point you can modify the commands it will use to boot. Just append '1' at the end of the 'kernel' line and boot, and it will go to single user mode.

Or, as others suggested, a bootable CD is a good option as well.