read-only file system sporratic

[Matt Patterson]

I get this occasionally on my usb external disks. You should unmount the 
disk:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Then you should run fsck on it:

sudo fsck /dev/sdb1

or for vfat drives (windows):

sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1 -a

You might have to specify some more options to make them fix the disk 
problems automatically. The problem is caused by errors in the file 
system, so linux remounts it read only.

Then remount the drive:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 ???

That should solve your problem and without rebooting. If you really dont 
want to wait for the fsck to run you can simply unmount and remount it, 
which will make it read/write again, but that is probably a bad idea.

Matt



Jim Pelton wrote:

> 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
>