[Fedora-livecd-list] need: mount -really-readonly, or a way to detect uncleanly unmounted FS

[Jane Dogalt]

Does anyone know any of a truly read only method (available tool) for detecting
if a filesystem (ext3 esp, vfat/ntfs/xfs/etc...) has been unmounted cleanly?

Specifically, the feature of a livecd mounting all visible filesystems
read-only is very nice.  But there are a pair of big danger issues, which I
should go see if knoppix is even bothering to check for these days-

suspend and journaling

It used to be fairly safe in a livecd to just do a mount -ro.  But these days
you have things like the severely annoying ext3 behaviour of modifying the disk
during a -ro mount, as well as suspended operating systems (i.e. that great new
feature in fc5) being very unhappy (I mean very unhappy) if their mounted
filesystems get modified at all while they are asleep.

My proposed workaround, requiring the tool above, is to only read-only mount
filesystems which have been flagged as cleanly unmounted.  I imagine this
applies to suspended ms-windows filesystems as well.

So does anybody know of a simple tool which can, without modifying a partition,
see if it's been cleanly unmounted.  I suppose it's just a matter of reading a
fs spec and reading some bit somewhere, but I'd rather not write the tool
myself if possible.

-jdog


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