I can't delete files 'rm: cannot remove X Read-only file system'
Solution 1
Depending on the state of things, the output of mount
may not reflect reality. You're far better of with cat /proc/mounts
, which is guaranteed to show you the actual mount table, wherein you'll probably find that it's actually mounted read-only. You can fix this with mount -o remount,rw /mount/point
. If that command errors out, then your filesystem is hosed in some way; a fsck
(at the very least) is in order. You don't need to stop the entire system to fsck a partition, just that partition needs to be unmounted.
Solution 2
You could try remounting the device and seeing where that leads
mount -o remount,rw /media/usbdisk
If that doesn't work then you'll probably need to fsck the device
umount /dev//media/usbdisk
fsck /dev/sdb1
You may need to use the -f option to umount for force it to be unmounted though.
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David
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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David almost 2 years
I am trying to remove an rdiff backup folder as some problems occured during the backup and need to remove it's history and try again. However, when I run:
rm -r -f rdiff-backup-data
I get the following on some of the files:
rm: cannot remove `X': Read-only file system
Here is what I get when I run mount:
/dev/sdb1 on /media/usbdisk type ext3 (rw)
So that shows the drive is rw?
ls -la /media/usbdisk gives the following:
[root@localhost v5]# ls -la /media/usbdisk total 36 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Mar 31 2010 . drwxrwxrwx 9 root root 4096 Dec 15 2009 .. drwxrwxrwx 39 501 501 4096 Aug 19 09:04 development-backup drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Mar 30 2010 lost+found drwxr-xr-x 8 root 501 4096 Aug 19 00:00 officeshare-backup
Anyone know what is going on and how to fix it?
UPDATE
found out the drive was ro in /proc/mounts so ran the remount command mentioned below and got the following:
ext3_abort called. EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_remount: Abort forced by user mount: block device LABEL=USBDISK1 is write-protected, mounting read-only ext3_abort called. EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_remount: Abort forced by user
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Ankur Loriya over 5 yearssometime this message might show due to file system corrupted. following this link to resolve filesystem related issue. askubuntu.com/questions/1020872/…
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Brian Peterson over 3 yearsThanks for linking the above. The basic idea is to run fsck ^
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David almost 13 yearsCan you run fsck on a partition if other partitions are mounted and running? That won't cause any problems? I have read that its best to go into single-user mode and don't allow any changes.
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David almost 13 yearscheers, now i just need to know serverfault.com/questions/304422/… (can i run fsck, if unmounted but users might still try to access using its mount location)
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user9517 almost 13 yearsYou are safe to run fsck on unmounted devices. If it really bothers you though, as this is a USB device, you can always unplug it and use a different system to fsck it.