> 2.0.30 goes nuts. Filesystem becomes read-only (even though
> mounted rw, which mount shows to be correct), LOTS of zombie
> processes, processes that cannot be killed, machine accepts
> telnets and seems to work but cannot be shut down via init
> (shutdown -n did the job), load at 15 even though top shows
> 95% free.
Linux remounts fs to read-only when an read/write error occurs
to prevent further damage on the fs. This is probably what happened
to you on your root filesystem. This behaviour can be tuned with
using an ext2fs mount option, for the savety of your data you should
prefer replacing your HD ASAP instead.
-Andi