Running vanilla from Read only partition

My embedded PC (Pentium-M) has an onboard ATA flash disk.
The disk is divided into 2 ext3 partitions.
The first partition contains grub, kernel, busybox + application and some configuration files. This is a bootable partition.
When the application runs it writes to the second partition.
Is it required to shutdown\reset the PC without entering shutdown\reboot at the shell. How can I make sure that the first partition will not be hardmed ? I do not want to run fsck upon boot.
The grub passes "ro" to the kernel. Is it enough ?
Should I use ext3 ?

Thanks.

The safer solution is to edit your /etc/fstab file and specify the 'ro'
option for your root partition, but you may need to create links or
writable partitions for things like /tmp /var which usually the
system writes logs etc.

If you are going to reset your PC without proper shutdown you should
do a checkout of your write partition every time you boot.

Keep in mind that even if you use a journaling file system like ext3
there is a small possibility that your partition doesn't recover
cleanly, specially if you are writing data constantly.

Best regards,