I just had a huge panic, when my file system 'spontaneously' turned read only! I was using netscape (3.04), and all its windows vanished from the screen. I tried to restart it, and got the 'detected lock' message, so I tried to 'rm' ~/.netscape/lock. It told me: rm: lock: filesystem readonly. (or words to that effect, unfortunately, I couldn't cut'n'paste, or record them electronically, and forgot to write down all the messages, sorry)
I tried removing this as root, and had the same problem, and found that my entire filesystem was read-only. Unfortunately, I had a very important file that I had been editing all morning open in emacs. I also found I could not RTFM, or send emails, because these operations needed to create tempory files. Luckily, I remebered that I had a mounted dos partition, and I was able to save my work on that, then re-boot. On shutdown, I got an error like: stopping system log daemon: warning failed to kill 107: no such process. And on reboot, got all sorts of filesystem errors, which, hopefully efschk has fixed. Does anyone have any idea what could have caused this to happen, and what I can do to prevent it from happening again. Thanks Rich