need urgent help with FC5 problem

[iamroot]

I've been using FC5 for quite some time now and everything's been running just fine. However, when I was using the system yesterday, I discovered that I could not create or delete any folder or file in my home account, and I get a message stating that my home directory is a "read-only disk". Some of my programs don't work as well, like Xine and Yum which I assume have to write some files to my home directory. Then my account locks up. I've already checked all the access boxes in my home directory's "Properties" list but I still can't write to my directory.

When I restart through the terminal, I get these errors:

rm: cannot remove "/var/...." : Read-only file system
.And the error just keeps going on for everything else, such as Firestarter and the other services. Can someone tell me what's going on with my system?

[Nostrafus]

I know this may be totally wrong, but did you change permissions in SU mode?

Maybe (big maybe) log on as root and see if you messed with your permissions by accident. Or try altering data as root to see if it is a permission issue.

Just an idea, probably way off.

[ppesci]

When kernel starts in a boot process, it access disk partition as read-only, that is done for check filesystems.
Later it opens as read write to perform normal tasks.

I think you can have problems when kernel try to acces some partition as read write mode.

These commands will help you:

cat /etc/mtab
display the mounted partitions, you must to see 'rw' for your disks partition. The partition with problen must to have 'ro'.

dmesg
This command shows every hardware recognized by the kernel, and the messages relative to it. If you are having problems with some partition, this command will show it.

Execute the commands, and if you have no clue, post the output here.
HTH

Pietro Pesci Feltri

[iamroot]

I've isolated the problem. Everything works fine until I try to copy files over from my external hard drive, which I was doing at the time the problem first cropped up. The moment I try to copy files over, the system will freeze up.