Comment 8 for bug 518938

When swapping the kernel out, how do you get to see a shell prompt from which to run dpkg in the first place? Is it necessary to build a custom boot disk as described at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization , or am I overlooking an easy answer to this?

(Without boot disk customization, the 9.10 alternate installer succeeded, and upon reboot GRUB ran successfully, but booting even in "recovery mode" yielded the old blank screen.)