read-only file system sporratic

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 12:48 -0600, 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
> 
What you're describing is most likely the result of an error on the main
file-system (root or "/".  You mentioned it in another message) that the
system had to remount it read-only for safety (so that no corruptions
occurs!).

To remount "/" again with read/write capabilities, do (don't do it until
you read the whole message!):
        sudo mount / -o remount,rw
However, I argue you *against* doing it!  As the best thing is to find
why the Kernel remounted the root file-system read-only.  Check
"/var/log/syslog" and the output of the command "dmesg" once you
encounter this behaviour again.  If you found somethings you think are
related to the problem but you didn't understand it just post here again
and we'll be happy to help.


(As a side note: I had a similar problem in the past. The cause (after a
*lot* of searching) was a bad memory!  Make sure that you don't have any
CPU/RAM problems and the cables to your HDD are connected well.  Run the
"Ubuntu, kernel memtest86+" from the menu when you boot your system and
see if it reports anything.  Be patient as it'll take a long time to
finish depending on the speed of your RAM and CPU.)

Ziyad.