read-only file system sporratic

[Jim Pelton]

Hello all! Here's an interesting one for ya. Twice now I have been 
working away fine, music playing, network humming along...things are great.

Then I will try to start firefox, emacs, or send an email with 
Thunderbird, save document with OOWriter, do anything that writes to the 
disk /dev/hdb (/dev/hdb1 to be exact with the partition number) and I 
get an error message. If the program is such that it out puts the error 
to an XTerm it usualy reads something to the tune of "IO Error could not 
write to disk: read-only file system." The problem persists until I 
force a reboot.

The reboot must be forced by shutting down the system because during the 
shutdown the machine freezes with error after error of "EXT3-fs ... ... 
read-only file system" or something of that nature. Now get this, when I 
start the computer up next time, it does it's BIOS system start-up 
stuff, then imideatly reports that "Hard Drive 1 is opporating outside 
of normal parameters...replace the drive...yada yada."

This happened this morning after it had been working fine for two or 
three days following some fixes done by fsck. It sounded like another 
fan started up, the HD started grinding, then the fan noise stopped and 
the errors came. I rebooted (by forcing a shutdown) and the computer 
came up fine this time, no erros at bootup, and no problems for several 
hours since.

Any suggestions? Hardware or software problem? Are there any tests I 
could run?

Oh /dev/hdb is the startup disk with usr directories and /boot. "touch 
testfile" does not work, even as root, however if I connect to the mount 
point of /dev/hda1 I can read/write just fine.

Thanks for the help!

Jim