random number as file owner

Linux and Unix-Like Linux
1

Dear all,

I get the situation from my office but i cannot think what is happening. please give me some advise.

  1. some file owner and group is changed to a very long number
  2. i login as root. when i touch a file or operate on the file like chown, cp, the response is "Read-only file system". even i operate in the root directory.

Thank you very much.
Rick Wong

2

Sometimes tar files will create foreign userids. However, this sounds like a corrupt filesystem. Can you boot the system into "single-user" mode and run "fsck -n" on this filesystem?