I can't delete files 'rm: cannot remove X Read-only file system'
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
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.