something I don't understand

[Dean S. Messing]

: Bonjour,
: 
: As I run short of place on my /home partition, I decided to format a new
: partition on my HD (some place were left) and call it home2 after
: creating it with fdisk. I run
: 
: mke2fs -j -L home2 /dev/hdax
: 
: then added this line in fstab:
: 
: LABEL=/home2 /home2 ext3 defaults 1 2
: 
: Then I rebooted the machine.... and, as there was a mistake in the
: fstab, I was dropped to a repair-partition prompt because fsck.ext3
: didn't know what to do with LABEL "/home2"....
: 
: I thought that there were no problem: I just type the root password and
: tried to comment the bad line in the fstab... Impossible: "the file is
: write protected" was the only answer I got from vi...
: 
: I was root, the fstab file has write permission for root, but it was
: impossible to modify this file....
: 
: WHY?
: 
: Thank you.
: 
: PS. I recovered with reformating the partition with the right syntax.

The behaviour is probably due to the parition being mounted "read-only".

>From the commandline, issue `mount' and look at the last item on the
line.  I'm guessing it says "(ro)".  You can change the write mode of
the partition by issuing

   mount -o remount,rw /dev/hda5

assuming /home is on hda5.

Now issue `mount' again and you will see that "(ro)" 
has changed to "(rw)".

Dean