Home partition becomes readonly

Question

Similar to this post, the file system on my home partition suddenly became read only. On reboot, my HHD containing this partition would not mount and I had to use fsck to repair it. Now it works fine. I don't recall doing anything particular that day and I was wondering: what can cause this kind of unexpected corruption?

My computer is setup only with one OS: Xubuntu 16.04 and I have an SSD for the OS and an HHD for my home. Note that I am not trying to have an answer specific to my issue. I only want to understand better what are those types of corruption and where they usually come from.

Answer 1

Generally, if there are any issues with I/O, the system will mount as read-only so that further writes don’t damage the file system, but you can attempt to salvage whatever you can before attempting a check/repair (fsck).

I would also have a look at the device’s SMART stats using the Disks utility to see if it is failing. Reallocated sectors and read/write/seek error rates may point to a failing device. But I’ve also had cases where the drives were fine and the motherboard was causing erratic behavior to devices connected to a specific set of SATA ports. Many variables to consider…

Source: Filesystem suddenly read-only? | Unix & Linux Stack Exchange