[newbie] booting in console mode and seeing booting logs to diagnose problem

[Anguo]

Hi all!   I dual boot win98 + Mandrake 8.1   Questions: 1- How can I use the boot disk to boot into the console mode rather than the graphical login?   2- Where can I then see the logs of the booting sequences.   Problem: KDE or any other window manager won't start anymore. The graphic login only has two options: previous and failsafe, neither of which get anything started. There are quite a few error messages that appear during the machine booting sequence. I'd like to see what they are so that I can solve (with your precious help) whatever problem there is.   I recently added a new FAT32 partition using diskdrake and then formated it under win98. I needed the new partitions so that I could install office2000. (I unfortunately still need that because of the lacking chinese support under linux - I still haven't been able to get it working properly). I think part of the problem is related to this (something about too many partitions being mounted...).    I'll be able to provide more details about the real problem once I get the answer to the two questions above...     Thanks for your help,   Anguo