Twice it has happened that I, all of a sudden, find myself working with a computer with "read only file system". Now, I wonder how that may be.

First time, I did nothing peculiar, some instant messaging, some downloading via dc. Suddenly something started to sound strange, like a CDtray getting stuck, more or less, and then - both ICQ and DC stopped working, due to "cannot open [thisandthat] : read only file system". I rebooted, got messages about inodes and stuff, did some fsck -> nothing in particular! and then it was fine until a few days ago.

Again, I sat in front of my PC, doing nothing really, some chat via ICQ, downloading stuff... well, now you know the drill.. ;-D... and *boom* there it was again. "[this_program] cannot open [this_folder]: Read Only File System". Again a check with fsck, but this time it complained about my superblocks being wrong. Not knowing what a superblock was, I rebooted without having done the fsck, and it all went fine. Or, should I say; no problems has occured yet.

The problem is: I haven't got the -slightest- clue as to what the %¤" is going on when it mounts my file system (on ~) Read Only. I really do not want that to happen on a regular basis, and I want to know why it does that so I can prevent such things in the future.

As for my system:
Fedora Core 2 kernel 2.6.5-1.358 running on a pIII 800MHz
Maxtor 80GB hdd (~5months old)
ext3 file system on all partitions (except swap)

First time I don't remember what commands I executed, but the second time I did some fsck.ext2 -cf /dev/hda and when it complained about superblocks fsck.ext3 -cf /dev/hda but alas! no superblocks were found (or what that was all about).. well... since the Maxtor is mounted as hda I do not know what to believe.

Anyway, has someone encountered the same problem as I? Or do someone know what it is and why my file system is being mounted as read only on occasion? Please let me know!

Yeah, this just recently happened to me. The first place I looked was in /var/log/messages, and I was rewarded with these lovely lines:

messages.3:Feb 25 12:48:21 leper kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 180896307
messages.3:Feb 25 12:48:21 leper kernel: Buffer I/O error on device hda2, logical block 89428026
messages.3:Feb 25 12:48:21 leper kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
messages.3:Feb 25 12:48:21 leper kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=180896309, high=10, low=13124149, sector=180896309

Anyway, I went down to single user mode, and spent about 4 hours doing an fsck. Fortunately, the blocks that were bad weren't really being used by much of anything, so as far as I could tell I didn't have anything important put in the "oh so helpful" lost+found folder.

So, to answer you question, yes, my HD has been put in RO mode, and it's because the disk started freaking out. I fsck'd it ( and told it to look for bad blocks as well )and remounted and everything has been fine since then.

Ok, thanks a bunch for answering, really great! :-D

These strange problems is a result of my hdd being somewhat corrupt, is that so? That was no good news. I bought it not long ago, and I had hoped it should stay put for a while.

And so to a follow-up question... If I do the fsck, it should recover my hdd in someway, isolating the badblocks, right? But why is it complaining about some "superblocks", the Maxtor is mounted as hda, so.. why the complaints? What command should I use? Why does it speak to me with these words?

Again, very grateful for some help..