Entire partition locked up during upgrade

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Sunday 16 March 2008, Bruce Bales wrote:
> rm: cannot remove /usr/foo .......... Read-only file system
>
> over and over.

The real key to this one is probably in /var/log/syslog or somewhere else 
in /var/log.  I don't see any clues in the text you posted.  One scenario is 
that there are some I/O or similar errors in the logs.

Unless I've done it myself, it seems Ubuntu defaults to mounting with  
errors=remount-ro which is an EXTREMELY EXCELLENT practice.  If you don't 
have this option in place, then what happens is you get some kind of low 
level error, and life continues on oblivious to the problem.  Eventually you 
get to witness a catastrophic and total filesystem failure, and then a kernel 
panic.

Been there, done that, in case you hadn't guessed.  It was a bad hard drive in 
my case, but it never looked like a bad hard drive.  Passed the SMART test 
and anything else I could think to throw at it, and seemed like it was always 
something else, until the day the hard drive finally revealed itself as the 
culprit by sitting there going click click click.  Literally less than 12 
hours after I had done a full backup.  That was lucky!

Anyway, I could be reading too much of my own past experience into your 
present, but that's what my nose says is probably responsible for an 
inexplicable switch to a read-only filesystem.  If I were you, I'd be 
checking out the connections to the drive, and still making plans to move to 
a new hard drive even if they check out.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre