I wrote:

My box had a problem with usb and hung. When I rebooted, it hung for ages on "cannot create /var/log/ksymoops/20030319.log. Read-only file system" then continued booting but brought up similar messages about not being

able

to create various files. Looking at 20030319.log, the permissions are 644 and it was created at the time of the reboot. It consists of lines such as 20030319 111648 start /sbin/modprobe -s -k -- usb0 safemode=1 20030319 111648 probe ended over and over. Commands such as "cp" and "rm" will no longer work, nor will vi, as I appear to be running a "read-only" file system. Flavour is debian, kernel 2.4.19. Can anybody help? I'm not too hot on file-system types. Many thanks, Jenny.

Problem seems sorted - I did a clean shutdown and reboot, and it ran fsck telling me hadn't shut down cleanly. I suppose that means it hadn't run on the previous boot even though it said it had. It seems okay now. My box has only crashed twice in the space of a year and both times has been a usb problem. Ta. Jen.