How to mount a filesystem in a read-only environment?

Solution 1:

The first error message is telling me that you'll need to reboot - there's something wrong with the disk device itself that the kernel can't resolve without a reboot. If you're booted from SAN, look carefully at your boot LUN and make sure there's nothing wonky with it, or the zoning for the SAN, or the export of the LUN.

Solution 2:

Set the mount point to anything that is not on the same partition as "/". For example, often the "/tmp" directory or some other directory is a separate partition. Then, it's as simple as creating a temporary mount point:

mkdir -p /tmp/mnt

and then

# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /tmp/mnt

AS long as /tmp is on a separate mountable partition, it completely bypasses any issues you're having with the root partition.