On Sat, 07 May 2005 18:50, Robert Himmelmann wrote:

> While playing eternal-lands my screen froze. Under SuSE that happeded
> before but not under Gentoo. I just restarted the computer. During the
> boot-process I got a message that said that the root filesystem is
> booted readonly. Obviously nothing works anymore. I haven't changed my
> kernel lately or done any other experiments. The only suspicious thing I
> found was that I found this line on the screen before the warnigs came:
>
> VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly.

This message is normal and expected.  The reiser file system is mounted 
read-only and the journal is checked to see if there are any incomplete disk 
writes, like this:

VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly.
reiserfs: found format "3.6" with standard journal
reiserfs: checking transaction log (device ide0(3,4)) ...
for (ide0(3,4))
ide0(3,4):Using r5 hash to sort names

Then if the journal says things look ok the filesystem gets re-mounted 
read-write.

If there are incomplete writes to the hard disk that are journaled then they 
normally get completed and a message to that effect gets printed in the boot 
messages, then the filesystem gets mounted read-write.

If there is a bigger problem then the boot process gets interrupted - 
sometimes you get dropped into a read-only shell, somethings you get told to 
boot to a read-only shell, so you can run reiserfsck and fix the filesystem.

> On SuSE after this message there comes this:
>
> Unmounting old root

That could be caused by your system using an initrd when booting, which is a 
file containing an image of a root directory with the drivers your system 
needs to load in order to boot.  As part of the boot process the initrd will 
be unmounted and the root directory on the hard disk will be mounted.

Anything else you can tell us?  You turn the computer on and it boots to what 
point?  What's the last couple of things you see?

Cheers,

Wayne

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