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Re: Root partition stuck in read-only mode.



On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 11:59:28PM -0500, Lloyd Zusman wrote:
> Thanks for your help.  This solved the immediate problem ...
> 
> Quoting Nathan E Norman <nnorman@incanus.net>:
> 
> > [ ... ]
> >
> > 1) You cannot remount / because other filesystems are mounted on it
> > (I
> > surmise this because you don't mention /usr or /home).
> > 
> > 2) / is readonly either because you provided no options at all, or
> > there are errors.
> > 
> > Here's what I would do:
> > 
> > 1) unb0rk your /etc/fstab.  the "errors=remount-ro" needs to be
> > there.
> 
> It's now unbOrk-able, because I can't alter it.  It's on a read-only
> file system.
> 
> But even so, I decided to continue ...
> 
> 
> > 2) reboot.  pause lilo or grub and boot with "linux emergency"
> > (replace
> > linux with the label of your default image)
> > 
> > 3) enter the root passwd when prompted.
> > 
> > 4) run "fsck /dev/sda2"
> 
> I performed steps 2, 3, and 4, and even though I was on a
> read-only file system, I figured I'd see what happens with the
> fsck.  When I ran it, it came back right away and said that
> /dev/sda2 is clean.
> 
> But hope springs eternal, so I'm continuing ...
> 
> > 5) run "mount -n -w -o remount /dev/sda2 /"
> 
> Now, it worked!  I now have a proper writable filesystem,
> and so I unbOrked /dev/fstab.
> 
> > 6) type "exit"
> 
> Did it ... and now, my system booted up just fine.
> 
> So ... now that things are sort of back to normal, my question
> is this:  what caused the filesystem to become read-only to
> begin with?  Could it be hardware errors?  The fact that the
> fsck found no errors seems to point to this as a possible cause,
> correct?

No, hardware errors would cause fs corruption I think.  Probably the
fact that the options field was blank caused the problem.  In the
future, make sure that field says "defaults" if you have nothing else
to put in there :-)
 
> At any rate, thanks again!

Glad it worked for you.  Random fs weirdness sucks.

-- 
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
  Profanity is the one language all programmers know best.



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