Powered off without shutting down - help!

[Stairforce]

I usually shut my Linux server down by doing
su
then
shutdown h- now

One time I forgot to do su and it only seemed to shut down my session, leaving me detached from the machine, which was still running. I did not want to leave it on all night (it sounds like a 737 taking off) so I powered it off.

Since then, although it does re-boot, it complains about lots of things, and won't go into kde any more. It used to automatically, but even if I try to run it manually, I get Error 13. (Don't know what that means.)

On the plus side, I backed the system up to tape (DDS3) the very day all this happened. If I knew how to kick off the restore from tape from the
command line, I could probably restore it.

[fingal]

I would install KDE's display manager KDM. That lets you log out without having to use a terminal. Or install Mandriva's version of KDM which is called MdkKDM. These should be accessible from the Mandriva Control Centre under System ...

From where you are now you could try startkde ...