[GLLUG] knoppix; read-write mounts spontaneously become read-only...?

[Daniel Hedlund]

Scott,

Scott Harrison wrote:
> After minimal writing of data to the disk (a few
> hundred kilobytes), /proc/mounts changes and the drive
> becomes read-only (while the "mount" command still
> shows the drive being read-write).

I believe what is happening is that sometime during the copying of files 
to the partition, the EXT2/3 driver is detecting 
errors/anomalies/out-of-syncness on the filesystem and switching itself 
to read-only to protect itself.  I've had this happen on a couple of 
occasions when copying a lot of files across to another hard disk.

The first steps you need to take are to make sure the ext3 partition is 
free from any errors by running fsck, ie:
fsck /dev/sda1

If this detects any problems, correct them and run fsck again to be sure 
everything is fixed.  You should also double-check that your hard disk 
is in reasonable condition and it's not starting to experience any 
hardware-related issues.  I'm not sure how to do this with SCSI hard 
disks, but IDE ones you can use smartctl.

I hope this gets you somewhere.

Cheers,

Daniel Hedlund
daniel at digitree.org