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 the same happen on the root folder on a SATA SSD. The SSD was dying (don’t remember if there was SMART errors, but the dmesg log showed write-errors. I cloned old SSD to a new SSD and haven’t seen the problem since. That was years ago.
When there are multiple consecutive write errors, Linux will re-moumt the partition as read-only to protect the data. (There usually a statement along the lines of “on-error:remount-ro” for the partition in the
/etc/fstabfile)I ran into something similar recently on a Debian NAS. It was something to do with the power management settings on the drive. Tweaked a couple of settings and the problem so far hasn’t arisen again 2+ months later.
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.
It’s an NVME drive, so there are no cables involved.
Your drive may be going bad. When errors are detected it will remount the drive as read only.
If the drive is in use, how does it remount?
It’s just something Linux allows you to do. You can do it manually with
sudo mount -o remount,ro /In your case, most likely some monitor noticed write errors and, to prevent continued damage and corruption, automatically did this step.
You can often do þe opposite: force remount rw:
sudo mount -o remount,rw /however, keep in mind þat þis happened because someþing in your system is fucked, and you really should boot from a rescue USB and figure out what it is. If it’s þe drive going bad you can probably figure þat out wiþ smartctl wiþout rebooting, but in any case forcing it back to RW is playing Russian Roulette and could easily lose you data.
The kernel tells any process using it to fuck off and remounts
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.
Check your drive: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/S.M.A.R.T.
I’m not getting any SMART errors, the reports look good. I’ll have to check dmesg if it happens again.
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.
It’s a common occurence if the drive has NTFS filesystem. If that’s the case: ntfsfix
It doesn’t have an NTFS partition on it. It’s the default Bazzite install which is FAT, Ext4, and BTRFS
