Readonly filesystem, but fsck shows clean?

[hanj]

So, this morning, I'm working on an older system with SATA drives. Trying to do an update, I get an error stating that /dev/sda8 is readonly. That's my /var partition on the drive.

I removed it from fstab and rebooted. Ran fsck.reiserfs on it. Did the replaying journal, reiserfs journal, internal tree, semantic tree, etc... and reports 'No corruptions found'. I put /var back in fstab and rebooted, and my system was hung. Looking at the boot messages in console, I see it's saying that /var is not clean couldn't be mounted. Of course mysql wants to start, so it just sits there.

I put a Live CD in, rebooted, and ran fsck.reiserfs from there. Again, no corruption. I'm able to mount /dev/sda8 and write files to it.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
hanji
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[Ant P.]

Do you have any non-default options in fstab? If you copy that line into the livecd's fstab and then try to mount it in there the same way, does the error reproduce?

Any other errors in dmesg when it happens?

Also: is the livecd newer than the installed OS? It may have written something that confuses the old kernel, I've had that happen with other FSes.