I rebooted and ran fsck and fixed it, but I wonder, what would cause this to happen? Is it an indication of hard drive failure? Could some software or corrupted files cause it?

EDIT: I may have found the culprit. I have a tarball that causes this to happen whenever I try to extract it. It does this:

and now everything is read-only again.

This happen to me couple times back in 13.0 and it was a stale socket and I was totally lost till I read around figured out that. I need to figure out why I lost write privileges /tmp/kde socket was an issue. for some reason during startup it did not create a new one and boom it thought I was already there.
That's all I have to say. blue moon.
as for that tar it is not a full tarball so it has no start or end ok. Corrupted or not fully downloaded.

Possibly a disk error and/or a corrupt filesystem.

Run "dmesg" (as root) to look at the kernel message logs.


Perhaps do "dmesg > pre.txt" to get a baseline then try to extract your tarball. Run "dmesg" (as root) again. You could do "dmesg > /tmp/post.txt", assuming /tmp is still writable.
If it is a disk error, you'd expect to see the kernel logging media errors and a message about remounting the filesystem read-only.

If there are no media errors, but the filesystem drops read-only you need to backup the filesystem, and then "fsck" it.
If there are media errors, backup the filesystem and then decide if the drive can be "repaired" by forcing it to remap the bad sectors - or whether the thing is toast and needs to be replaced.


Post a section of the dmesg errors and we'll try to help you.
Also post the output of "smartctl -a /dev/sda" as root, assuming sda is your drive.

Marc

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What filesystem?