LinuxQuestions.org - File system went read-only

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File system went read-only

I had Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop and then installed Pyppy 4.31 (full installation) on a separate partition. Things were good (not mentioning wireless problems in Puppy) at first but now when I boot into Puppy I get messages that it can't touch anything and the file system is read-only. I have no idea how that happened. I looked at Puppy's fstab and found nothing suspicious. I also changed "defaults" to "rw" for the root partition but nothing changed.

Can it bee that the two OS's affect each other somehow?

Most probably something in the boot, so the kernel mounts it read only and gives you the middle finger until you fix it.

fsck the disk and check the logs.

I didn't know puppies had middle fingers. fsck does not return any errors. Log files are mostly empty (I've used Puppy only a little bit).
The file var/log/messages consists of the single line:

Nov 21 18:20:30 (none) syslog.info syslogd exiting

The file /tmp/udevtracelog consists of the following line:

remove_target5:0:0_scsi___

You can easily fix the symptoms, but not the disease. No, the two distros aren't affecting one another, unless you've really done something daft, which, unless you built the two with dd or from source (read: waaaaay too complex), you haven't.

What is in /boot/grub/menu.lst (or /boot/grub/grub.conf - its an either/or)

It's below. Grub is in Puppy's partition. I was able to boot into Puppy a few times before that happened (with the same menu.lst). Something weired is that in Ubuntu, even with root privileges I can't open files like hda1, hda2 in Puppy's /dev folder.

Code:

# GRUB configuration file '/boot/grub/menu.lst'.

# generated by 'grubconfig'.  Thu 19 Nov 2009 08:05:45 AM UTC

#

# The backup copy of the MBR for drive '/dev/sda' is

# here '/boot/grub/mbr.sda.2833'.  You can restore it like this.

# dd if=mbr.sda.2833 of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

#

# Start GRUB global section

#timeout 30

color light-gray/blue black/light-gray

# End GRUB global section

# Linux bootable partition config begins

  title Puppy Linux on (/dev/sda1)

  root (hd0,0)

  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro vga=normal 

# Linux bootable partition config ends

# Linux bootable partition config begins

  title Ubuntu on (/dev/sda5)

  root (hd0,4)

  kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro vga=normal 

# Linux bootable partition config ends

# Linux bootable partition config begins

  title Moblin on (/dev/sda8)

  root (hd0,7)

  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda8 ro vga=normal 

# Linux bootable partition config ends

And here is Puppy's fstab:

Code:

/dev/sda1    /            ext3    rw                    0 1

none          /proc        proc    defaults              0 0

none          /sys        sysfs    defaults              0 0

none          /dev/pts    devpts  gid=2,mode=620        0 0

/dev/fd0      /mnt/floppy  auto    noauto,rw              0 0

Bugger, its never easy, is it. You don't want to be trying to open puppy's devices via ubuntu, so that not working is no big problem.

A quick question; don't Ubuntu and puppy generally use an initial root disk? Whats on the menu.lst for ubuntu? Can you do a diff between the menu.lst you posted, and the backup referred to at the top on the list?