Joe,
I think the only unusual thing is it had a power
interruption when setting idle.
Usually those are not so destructive -
Could the tmp directory be
a sub under another directory and ls -l /tmp not have found
it?
If so, then /tmp had been moved, which is rather disturbing as well -
Also, what is the command to make a directory?As root, do this:
cd / mkdir tmp chmod 1777 tmp
Joe