Booting without xorg running mint 17.1 cinnamon

[David]

OK, so I guess this is a different way of askinga question I've been
wrestling with for a few days now.  I need to install a driver downloaded
from nvidia, which when run tells me to stop xserver and try running
again.  I've tried several commands but haven't had any success this time.
I installed the driver once before with the sudo service mdm stop command
but this time it also results in a blank screen.  So my thought now is to
find a way to boot directly into a command line without xserver starting in
the first place, I've read that there are options to edit
/boot/grub/grub.Cfg and edit a line so that it goes something like
boot..... quiet splash text.  The result of this was finally that I had to
use my install disk to be able to get back into terminal so I could revert
the file back to it's original setting.  I've read that there are ways to
set it to run at default 'run levels' 0-6 with some of them running without
x loading, but I don't feel like I understand at all where to change that
or which run levels do what.  So I'd really appreciate it if anyone knows
how and where to edit run levels to boot without x starting I'd really
appreciate it, or any other ways to stop x and be able to install the
driver.  I still have no internet so anything that requires Internet access
is out for me.
Thanks for any advice
David
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20151006/6aee5a3c/attachment.html>