/ stuck in read-only mode. can't mount or remount any fs as root
I have a very strange problem with a system running debian 2.4.27
I did not build the system or the kernel. And, I is a bit of a
newbie with linux and sys admin in general.
I had some disk errors and shutdown to reseat cables.
The system, as-is, has been running and reboot more than once
with no problems before now. Perhaps the shutdown wasn't
graceful??
On boot up the / partition came up read-only and /var /proc etc.
all are unmounted. fsck is run on all the disks and the
system disk is clean for all 3 partitions hda1 (/) hda2 (/var)
and hda3 (/t0) fsck not run on hda5 (should be swap). All of
my filesystems appear to be ext2.
2 other disks on a PCI controller are giving DMA errors and
interrupt errors. I don't think this is related.
boot sequence drops me to a maint. root login prompt and
I log in. But, trying to mount /var or anything else fails
with this error: "mount: only root can do that"
Same error when I try to remount / rw.
If I go to a normal user level login prompt neither root nor any other
user can login. Only at the maint prompt can I get logged in.
I can boot from a knoppix CD and get to all the filesystems and edit
/etc/fstab but nothting seems to help.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
thank you,
dan
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