I'm posting this from a computer lab away from home so the details may be a little sketchy.

I am currently running Mandrake 9.1.

In a rush to shutdown my linux box I was frantically trying different commands, forgetting that halt was what I was looking for. I was familiar with using shutdown -r now to reboot the computer, so without looking at the man pages to reference shutdown, I just used "shutdown now". Of course, instead of going through the shutdown process I was sent into single user mode and in runlevel 1 (I think). I then remembered that halt was the command I was looking for and then used that and left for a few days.

I come back to the box yesterday and boot it up to my command prompt login. I login and then try to start up X/KDE and it tries momentarily and then brings up an error. The error was similar to "screens not available". I rebooted and checked to ensure that I was booting into runlevel 5, which is the Mandrake default (I think). I'm pretty much at a loss as to why I'm unable to start up X and KDE and I don't have the first idea where to begin looking to correct my error. Also, while booting the initial process of checking for new hardware now fails everytime, although this one is a minor issue until I have new hardware .

Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Look into /var/log directory, for file XFree86.0.log. It's X WIndow log, all errors and warnings go there. If unsure, post a part of the file (what you think is important).

After checking the logs the error is actually related to the NVIDIA kernel module. When X is starting it is unable to open the module and thus I am sent back to the command prompt.

However, I still believe this problem is related to the fact I used the shutdown command and was switched out to single user mode. I understand that X cannot start in single user mode and this error did not occur until I used that command. What are some steps I can take to get rid of this problem.

To switch to multiuser mode use
init 3
(console multiuser) or
init 5
(multiuser with X)

The system boots into runlevel 5 by default.

I tried using both init 3 and 5 and neither resolved the problem.

What ahppens when you run:
modprobe nvidia
and then 'startx' (in runlevel 3)?

That did the trick Mara.

Thanks a ton for your help