PITR - warm standby switchover question

I've followed the implementation instructions at 24.4.2:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/warm-standby.html

And I've used the archive/restore commands from the example in F23.2:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgstandby.html

This all works great. The primary backs up the WAL archives to a mutually
accessible folder and the backup system is continuously reading in the
logs. Monitoring the "standby.log" file shows that the system is working as
it should.

My question is, if the main system goes down, what do I do to the backup
machine to make it come alive? Currently, when I attempt to login to the
database, I get the error: "psql: FATAL: the database is starting up" I'm
assuming this means it can't be accessed while its in continuous recovery
mode. I attempted to turn off postgresql on the main server and try
connecting again, same error (was obvious, but I do things one step at a
time...) So then I removed the "recovery.conf" file on the backup server
and attempted to restart postgresql. It stopped fine, but the restart
failed.

The pg_log/postgresql-XXXX-XX-XX.log file says:
LOG: database system was interrupted while in recovery at log time
2009-04-14 17:36:14 CDT
HINT: If this has occurred more than once some data might be corrupted and
you might need to choose an earlier recovery target.
LOG: could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000100000002000000DD" (log file 2,
segment 221): No such file or directory
LOG: invalid primary checkpoint record
LOG: could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000100000002000000DC" (log file 2,
segment 220): No such file or directory
LOG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record
LOG: startup process (PID 3756) was terminated by signal 6: Aborted
LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? How do I bring the standby server out of
standby do act as the primary?