My partitioning is as follows: /dev/hda1 / /dev/hda5 /home /dev/hda6 swap /dev/hda7 /data

All are ext3.

The / partition is mounting read-only very frequently, in spite of clean shutdowns. As a result, the only apps I can use are Firefox and Thunderbird. Anything else (even those two if have to download something) requiring access to / (specially /tmp) doesn't work. For e.g., running "man" on any command gives "man: can't create a temporary filename: Read-only file system".

I looked through the output of dmesg and found the following piece interesting. <cut> [17180032.820000] hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } [17180032.820000] hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=23677870, sector=23677863 [17180032.820000] ide: failed opcode was: unknown [17180032.820000] end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 23677863 [17180032.820000] Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 2959725 [17180032.824000] EXT3-fs error (device hda1): ext3_readdir: directory #1470023 contains a hole at offset 0 [17180032.824000] Remounting filesystem read-only <cut>

The full dmesg output is here http://rvbhute.org/full_dmesg_error.txt Is my disk failing or is it case of partitioning/formatting gone wrong?

Regards.