I was on my computer and running updates and something about firefox kicked me to a text screen from which I was forced to do a hardware reboot. On reboot, plymouth should low graphics mode and displayed a message saying that it cannot find / and I could wait or open a terminal for manual recovery.
Waiting does nothing. FSTAB is in order. fsck has been run.
The only clue of where I might go from here is given from when I ran this:
$ sudo touch /forcefsck
touch: cannot touch '/forcefsck': Read-only file system
Are there any suggestions?