In my post, I mentioned trying "failsafe knoppix 2" and "failsafe 2", which was my attempt to reach the text-only mode and stack commands.

I never used runlevel 2, before... I have used runlevel 1 (single user mode), runlevel 3 (text only networked mode) and runlevel 5 (graphical networked mode). IIRC, runlevel 0 (zero) is system halt, and runlevel 6 is reboot. Again, IIRC, only runlevel 4 is unused, so runlevel 2 must be text only non-networked mode.

I do appreciate your suggestions, though. I will have to look through the docs again and see if there isn't anything I missed.