Entire partition locked up during upgrade

[Bruce Bales]

On Sunday 16 March 2008 12:56, D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> 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

Thanks, Michael.  The syslogs are full of useless entries -- each time 
I mount a camera or thumbdrive and worse, everytime spamd looks at an 
email.  I can't find any errors there.  grep err doesn't bring up 
anything.

I'll shut down and check connections.
bruce