Please excuse me for replying to my own thread, but I have some
additional information.
On Jan 15, Michael Fischer
er, help!
Last night I shut down my main machine. This morning I turned it on, and discovered that no matter what, it would not "unmount the initrd" and mount the "/" filesystem rw, only ro.
I booted from the first CD (9.0) in rescue mode, backed up a few gig of data to another machine. I could not get any thing more useful than what I stated in the first pargraph out of the /var/log/* for debugging purposes, however.
At first I decided to simply transition to the second machine, but after moving the sound card over to it, I discover that it does not power up correctly. (bad day for working with computers, it seems)
So back to the first machine: before I simply try to reinstall, does anyone have any clever suggestions to rescue that one? For what it is worth, it was running 9.0, GRUB, one disk. I saw nothing in the boot messages (as they scrolled by) from ext3 about needing to fsck, etc. And once mounted from the rescue boot (mount /dev/hda3 /mnt; cd /mnt; chroot /mnt) I suffered no ill effects during usage.
Ok, small update, for what it is worth: I decided to at least work from the rescue mode of the CD for a bit, and went to return the sound card to the original machine. For grins, I booted it normally, and it came up fine. But I didn't trust this state of affairs, so I tried it again, and it has persistently only come up with / as read-only. I ran the repair system mode from Yast, but it neither claimed to find errors, nor fixed anything when I told it to fix GRUB anyway (I'm shotting in the dark here). Again, thanks in advance. Michael Fischer