I’m running Bazzite, which is immutable, so the root filesystem is read-only, but I’ve been having an issue pop occasionally where the rest of my filesystem, including my home folder, becomes non-writable. I can’t do much, and constantly get popups about folders being non-writable until I reboot, and then everything goes back to normal.
Does anyone know what can cause this to happen? And is there a way to deal with this without rebooting when it does happen? I don’t know when I’ll be able to try anything out since it’s not a frequent issue, but it has happened to me several times in the past.
I had this happen with a few drives. The cause was bad cables to the HDDs causing random errors. Had to try a bunch of different cables until the errors stopped happening.
If the problem is showing up out of the blue with no HW changes or anything, definitely back up any data you want to protect from the computer before you get too far down the road, because the HDD might be legitimately failing.
Your drive may be going bad. When errors are detected it will remount the drive as read only.
Check your drive: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/S.M.A.R.T.
Yes, but just because SMART does not complain does not mean the drive has issues. If it does, it means there are issues. That should be kept in mind.
Literally explained in the link.
Unless there is an above average drive controller on board, it wouldn’t be getting out into read-only and still accessible without triggering an error in online drive checks.
Just because the linked site does mention it does not mean it is not worth pointing out.
Check dmesg logs and SMART check the drive.
I had two crucial drives that would go read only, some sort of firmware bug I guess.
Was there a fix?
Nope, just stopped using it as my main drive. It becomes read-only far less often when only used as additional storage and less strenuous reading/writing.
I assume it is a firmware bug because both my original and replacement drive had the same issue.
It’s a common occurence if the drive has NTFS filesystem. If that’s the case: ntfsfix
