File system switched to read-only
 

Hi there!

The following problem has been worrying me for several months, and still I wasn't able to find a reason for it...

Every then and now, my file system (EXT3) switches to read-only.

System: Thinkpad T30, openSUSE 11.1, 60 GB HDD, 1 partition (sda1) mounted as /

* For a long time I had been thinking it occured only when I was watching videos from a mounted NFS volume via WLAN, but just today it happened when I was not watching. - In any case, I see no factual connection between the NFS mount and my root FS going r/o.
* The partition has 8 GB of free space
* I wasn't able to correlate the described failure with SMART log entries, which leads me to the assumption that my HDD is physically ok.

Attachment 1844
in this file I collected the dmesg outputs of 3 situations

Attachment 1845
In this file there is the SMART output ca. 3 hours after situation 3. I am not sure whether I understand the output, but as far as I can tell, the drive is ok. From the power_on_minutes value (16657h+19min) and the time of the last errors (16383 hours) I conclude that the going read-only is not related to the SMART log entries.

Well... that's pretty everything I got so far. I would be very pleased if somebody could tell me what is going on, what other logs might be helpful or what else I can do.

Thanks in advance!

Reinhard.

Take a look at the output of the dmesg command, as well as /var/log/messages.
Normally, mounting read-only means that a filesystem operation returned an error state, which can be a simple filesystem error, so you may just be able to run an fsck on the disk. It could also be a bug in the filesystem driver, or a hardware problem (possibly with the drive's cable, the hard disk controller or the motherboard. or a physical disk error that SMART isn't picking up for some reason).