A read-only file system on a Linux computer can be a bad day at the office. It generally means something went wrong with your disk and the operating system has mounted it in read-only mode to prevent further damage. This problem mostly occurs on physical hard drives. This brief article discusses a happy path when this error was encountered and how it was fixed.
Summary of problem
In the example below, /dev/sdc1 mounted as /mnt/backupdrive had errors and it wasn’t possible to write to it anymore. The disk utility fsck was then used to check it, and after fixing the problems the disk was remounted.
umount /dev/sdc1 fsck.ext4 -f /dev/sdc1 sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdc1 /mnt/backupdrive/