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My Dell 3000 has a dual boot of Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10, when I boot into Ubuntu it starts off ok but randomly switches to read-only so I cannot do any work. I've done some research and I've run fsck and the problem still persists.

A badblocks search of my HDD shows 0/0/0 errors. I'm at my wits end, will a reinstall of the Ubuntu fix the problem?

Thanks

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  • What partition/mount is going from rw to ro? More importantly, why? The syslog (often in /var/log/syslog) or maybe dmesg should say something about why it's happening.
    – Xen2050
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 11:44

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I would back up any important data you have right now - it sounds like your drive is going bad. If your drive is dying it might not show bad blocks or even fs errors, for example, if the control board is just crashing after a little while. You may get more information from smartctl.

Make a copy of your drive and / or backup your data, then replace the drive.

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  • I've already copied everything, will a hard format of the Hard Disk clear the problem?
    – Stanley Ngumo
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 10:54
  • If the drive is going bad no amount or method of formatting will help it. If you run this command: sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sda then post the output of: sudo smartctl -x /dev/sda it might help shed some light on the issue. Also, do you get errors when running fsck? Do you have any disk issues in Windows? The last few pages of journalctl -g /dev/sda may also be helpful.
    – Layne B
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 11:18
  • No I actually don't have any problems in Windows. And I run a diagnostic on the computer directly and it was fine!!!
    – Stanley Ngumo
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 11:22
  • Hmm. Without more information (logs, tests, etc) it's impossible to say. You could try using gparted to repair the file system, I've had success with this in the past when fsck wasn't helping. If that doesn't work you could try upgrading to 18.04.1 Bionic Beaver. If that doesn't work either you may as well try reinstalling Ubuntu.
    – Layne B
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 11:29
  • Don't even know why it's remounting as ro, and Windows seems fine, so replacing the drive seems very premature
    – Xen2050
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 11:55

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