should work.
Are you using suse's grub? If the above or following doesn't work let me know and I'll boot to it and report back. I just haven't had the need to do it since installing suse. I say this because it seems suse has its own unique way of controling grub/boot. I've seen mandrake not obey inittab. In general, since linux is linux and grub is grub the above and the following should work.
with suse's grubhighlight suse's entry, at the bottom you should have a commandline. Type;
init 3
and press Enter.
another grubhightlight suse's entry, press e (for edit), then highlight the kernel line and press e (for edit) again so that all you see is (example);
kernel (hd0,7)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda8 idebus=133 hdd=ide-scsi splash=quiet vga=normal
go to the end and add init 3;
kernel (hd0,7)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda8 idebus=133 hdd=ide-scsi splash=quiet vga=normal init 3
press Enter then b (for boot)
CODE
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SuSE9Pro
kernel (hd0,7)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda8 idebus=133 hdd=ide-scsi splash=quiet vga=normal
initrd (hd0,7)/boot/initrd
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: ML-10/k-2.6###
title ML-cooker/k-2.6
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.0 root=/dev/hda6 devfs=mount idebus=133 hdd=ide-scsi acpi=on splash=quiet vga=normal
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd-2.6.0.img
suse is nice, eh?