Editor help. PLEASE ??

Hello Linux stalwarts. Running SuSE 9.2 on an AMD64 system. Screwed up bigtime. Needed some more space so I deleted a rarely used partition to make more room. Failed to follow through with proper changes to my fstab file. On my next reboot the system failed. Managed to boot the system as root from the CLI. After figuring out what the problem was, I tried to edit the fstab file in vi (vim actually) Couldn't figure out how to make it work. Couldn't even call up the 'help' manual (via F1) to be able to proceed. Can somebody, PLEASE, give me a step by step so that I can edit that file? Bob S.