Why do I find the disk is suddenly read-only or get the message “mounting root filesystem as read-only” or similar?
First off, check the disk isn’t read-only. If it’s a floppy, make sure that one of the holes in the disk should be closed by the little black tab. Otherwise, this usually indicates a (possibly minor) problem with the underlying filesystem. Freesco uses a filesystem called UMSDOS to let itself be used on DOS FAT-formatted disks. This allows you to use the complex and powerful Linux filing system (e.g. symbolic and hard links, long, case-sensitive filenames, many different permissions, and the file owners / groups concept) without having to reformat your hard drive. It works by letting UMSDOS “pretend” to be a Linux filesystem, and then instead of writing directly to the disk, UMSDOS writes everything down in “normal” files on a FAT disk (which is why, when you look at the Freesco directory in DOS, you see strange filenames and —LINUX–.— files everywhere). If, when Freesco boots, it detects any problems with the underlying FAT filesystem or these files, it will automatically revert
