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that grayed out screen with all the different languages on it telling you to hold down the power button to shut off the computer.
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That's called a kernel panic.
Anytime your system has one or after any hard restart you should immediately repair your disks before continuing to work. If not you'll have disk corruption that will eventually manifest itself in problems like these if you're lucky, and a hosed hard drive if you're not.
If your system has recurring kernel panics you should investigate the cause. It's telling you that it's very unhappy about something, and that something is a serious problem.