LinuxQuestions.org - Finished Chapter 6 /mnt/lfs disappeared

I just finished LFS 6.2 chapter six using the LFS cd with xwindows running. I was going to shut down before finishing the LFS install. Instead of using the X menu to shutdown, by accident I typed into the virtual shell I had open in a terminal:

Code:

shutdown now

Everything disappeared except for the X background, and the mouse was frozen in the center of the screen. I assumed all processes had halted and so I turned off the computer. When I turned it back on there is no longer any directories in /mnt/. My first hunch is that the computer hadn't finished shutting down, and when I powered down I messed up the hard drive partition, but perhaps not. There were some other fishy things going on:

When I was configuring vim (Chapter 6.57) I was copying some code from LFS into the shell but something happened when I pasted the code, and half of the keyboard no longer responded. (I don't have the log but when I pasted code I might have hit the wrong key. I remember seeing the character ^[[M show up before the pasted text once). Instead of normal input the shell I was in would autocomplete commands that I had not entered, and also strange symbols would show up instead of the english letters. However other terminals I had open continued to operate fine. I figured it wouldn't hurt to just finish the last pieces of code for chapter 6 by pasting them into the shell, and then exiting that one weird shell.

One last piece of information...I also ran the debugging stripper (Chapter 6.59) before shutting down. This was code which I literally copied and pasted from LFS:

Code:

chroot $LFS /tools/bin/env -i \

    HOME=/root TERM=$TERM PS1='\u:\w\$ ' \

    PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin \

    /tools/bin/bash --login



/tools/bin/find /{,usr/}{bin,lib,sbin} -type f \

  -exec /tools/bin/strip --strip-debug '{}' ';'

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.