System in Read-Only Mode

[indialinks]

I had a strange problem today. Wanted to share my experience.

One of my sysadmin was trying to enable disk quotas. And he forgot to put "COMMA" between defaults & usrquota

/etc/fstab had

defaultsusrquota instead of defaults,usrquota

He rebooted system and system came in READ-ONLY mode.

It didnt even allow me to edit and save /etc/fstab

I submitted support ticket but no help.


Finally i found way out which allowed me to remount the primary partition without reboot or editing fstab

mount -t ext3 -o remount /dev/hda3/ /

After this I could edit fstab and correct the problem.

Bhavin

[bow-wow]

Actually it's not so strange. Your system had trouble mounting the filesystem with the given options in fstab therefore it mounted the filesystem as read-only. You can actually specify what action to take using the following options in fstab.

* <errors=continue> ignore error, mark file system erroneous and continue
* <errors=remount-ro> remount as read only
* <errors=panic> panic and halt the system