boot to command line ???

Hi All, I had an older installation of suse 8.1 crash on me. I am no longer able to boot into the gui. It goes as far as the login screen, and just before the login window appears, it freezes. My question is. How can i boot in text only mode? I did it the other day by accident, and was able to CD around on the hard drives .... I desperately need to get the data off this machine as it was a server... best regards, Paul Agner pagner@consumerinfo.com 949-567-3748