Read-only filesystems?

[EmilyRose]

Hi there, I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 with GNOME Desktop installed alongside Unity. 4 days ago when my husband was at work, his suddenly started acting 'wonky', when he got home from work yesterday I realized that portions of it had been set to 'read-only' and after a bit of googling decided that it might be the hard drive failing, but thought I'd try re-installing. Initially I re-installed, w/o formatting his /home partition, which initially worked using Unity. But after I re-installed GNOME and updated it, it went back to not functioning... at which point I did a full reformat and it now (running Unity - with very little else installed) seems to be OK.

However, in the midst of this, my computer suddenly started doing the *exact same thing* - I'm now in the midst of backing up my data on our third 'backup' desktop which is usually my childrens' system (Xubuntu 12.10).

When I restart my system it says there are errors in the /home partition and asks if I want to fix them, when I say yes, it seems to and then boots OK... but the next time I shutdown/reboot it does this again, and after working on it for a couple of hours the file system will suddenly set itself to 'read only'... which is exactly what his was doing.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[matt_symes]

Hi

What is the in the log file /var/log/syslog ?

Kind regards

[EmilyRose]

Lots... I'm trying to get a browser to open on it, but not a lot of luck...

Towards the end are several dozen lines similar to this:

... kernel: [428xx.4xxxx] iwlwifi: 0000:0x:00xx fail to flush all tx fifo queus

[matt_symes]

Hi

Let's try to narrow the syslog output down a bit.

Please post the output of

egrep 'sd[a-z]' /var/log/syslog

Kind regards

[Seb71]

See this bug:
Sudden Read-Only Filesystems

[EmilyRose]

Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 1.071058] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 1.071099] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 1.071102] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 1.071127] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 1.096029] sda: sda1 < sda5 > sda2 sda3
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 1.096793] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.473485] EXT4-fs (sda5): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.829481] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 7813120 512-byte logical blocks: (4.00 GB/3.72 GiB)
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.831108] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.831111] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.832013] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.832015] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.835971] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.835974] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.836850] sdb: sdb1
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.839847] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.839850] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 2.839851] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 15.624144] Adding 15625212k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:15625212k
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 16.116298] EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 16.962782] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
Feb 12 12:20:55 Final-Frontier kernel: [ 66.941600] EXT4-fs (sda3): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
Feb 12 12:22:57 Final-Frontier udisksd[2217]: Mounted /dev/sdb1 at /media/emily/4193-B5A2 on behalf of uid 1000

[EmilyRose]

Ok, just read through the bug report, sounds right... is there a way to install an older linux kernel w/o re-installing?

[EmilyRose]

And... its back. I know I did a rather large update on Sunday night with it reappearing yesterday once, and this morning I've already had to reset 3x.

[matt_symes]

Hi

Have you tried disabling power management on the drive ?

sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

It may chew up your battery a bit but it may also stop the problems you are having (worth a try).

Run the command at startup for a while and if it works, we can look at making it permanent by editing

/etc/hdparm.conf

Kind regards

[EmilyRose]

The last time I rebooted I re-ran the instructions for time for the 3rd time (sudo ntpdate time.nist.gov us.pool.ntp.org ntp.ubuntu.com north-america.pool.ntp.org pool.ntp.org && sudo hwclock --systohc) and it hasn't *knock on wood* reoccured since then... This is the most fustrating bug I have encountered on a GNU/Linux system in years. I'm nervous to work on much of anything offline as I don't want to loose work when my harddrive randomly stops saving.