Disk suddenly read-only

[Derek Broughton]

ubuntu at acrasis.net wrote:

> Why might a disk suddenly become read-only?  I have a 7.04 AMD64 server
> with two disks, /dev/sd{a,b}.  The trouble is on sda which has
> partitions for /var and /boot.  I can 'ls' the contents of these, but:
... 
> 
> What happened?  (How) can it be fixed?

Disk errors.  fsck the /var filesystem.  (I'm not sure from the error
whether /boot is the same - it doesn't _say_ it's read only).

I know this happens with ext3 systems, I'm not certain about other
filesystems.
-- 
derek