Home partition suddenly becomes read-only

Hey folks,

I’ve been having this issue for the past 2-3 months where, if I keep my computer running long enough (~8 hours and sometimes even less), my filesystem becomes read-only. The way to fix it is by going to a live USB boot and running fsck on each partition and booting manjaro again (with no issues).

I was wondering if you guy can help me dubug it.

Here are a few things about my setup. I’m running two partitions basically, a home and a root partition, both are ext4 file systems. I also have an old windows partition lying around and some unallocated space in the same disk.

Now, before coming to you guys I did a few housekeeping things that I knew were harming things. Basically, I had a lot of old Pacman caches and builds lying around, a lot of docker images, and some old backups which I thought were the source of issues since I was capping the size of both of them, the home and root partitions. I thought that clearing the space was going to help me but the sudden file system on read-only mode still comes back after a while.

About my machine. I have a Dell Inspiron 5457, running the kernel 5.10.34-1-Manjaro.

CPU: Intel i7-6500U (4) @ 3.100GHz
GPU: Intel Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520]
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 930M
Memory: 4097MiB / 15903MiB

I’ve been meaning to re organize my partitions in this disk, but I didn’t have any backup and couldn’t do any. No I’ve backed them up so that I can delete and resize everything without fear of loosing them, but I don’t know if that could be the source of the troubles I’m facing.

Hi @gui42, and welcome!

I’ve oly read the first paragraph here, in bed here and almost asleep, but the title and that paragraph makes it sound like I’d say you hard drive is failing!

Backup and replace ASAP, is what I think you should do…

Hope this helps!

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You should have seen some messages in journal regarding the readonly (re-)mount.
It usually happens to protect a filesystem when some errors occur to prevent further writes and possible damage.
Check your journal, make backups and possibly replace the drive.

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I‘m afraid @Mirdarthos is right in his diagnosis. A file system suddenly deciding to change authorization, seems to be a sure indicator for your hard drive approaching the end if it‘s natural life. Especially as you indicate this occurring after hours of use, so the drive is warmed up quite a bit.
So you might be very happy that you have now a backed up system. Do you know how old your current drive is?

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Huum, I see. Thank you for the input everyone!

I’m running a few s.m.a.r.t tests to see how bad the situation is. But I’ve purchased this laptop in 2017 and it stayed off use for about a year before coming back to regular use.

I don’t know if that is a long time for hard disks, but I’m searching for a replacement as we speak.

It depends on the type, but even new drives ─ HDD or SSD ─ may fail within a short time after buying them. This is because they were already bad to begin with, but somehow they had managed to slip through quality control at the factory.

In this day and age of high-volume manufacturing and ubiquitous automation, this sort of thing is not uncommon. Myself, I’ve had it happen to me twice that a HDD began failing within six weeks after acquiring the computer.

Quality control is unfortunately no longer what it used to be, and this does not only apply to the world of computer peripherals. I’ve once had a car that was delivered to the dealership as brand-new from the factory, and it rolled into the dealership with a big tear in the roof liner and electrical problems. And then there are yet other examples I can list.

The joys of industrialization… :roll_eyes:

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