Hi,
I tried upgrading from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 according to an article I saw on tech republic.
It involved changing the servers in /etc/apt/sources.list from karmic to lucid.
It seemed to go ok... until I tried rebooting.
It rebooted, but didn't seem to boot.
Not a problem, I thought, because I had the trouble shooting steps in the upgrade tutorial (which I conveniently found after the fact).
I followed the instructions, making a finnix recovery disk.
I then booted it up, and tried mount /dev/xvdb
It worked, except that it mounted it as read-only, which is not quite right, as I need to write to a file to get it working.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
-Michael.

Not sure how you are getting to this file, but I would chmod 777 to get you to be able to edit the file, But I would suggest you check what the file perm is supposed to be.

Were you following this tutorial?

http://library.linode.com/troubleshooti ... 0.04-lucid

You can try

mount -o remount,rw /dev/zzzz /mnt/zzzz

to remount a read-only filesystem as read-write. You'll need to replace the z's with the correct device and mount point.

This is very much *NOT* the proper way to upgrade.

There's an official upgrade document from Ubuntu, and the Linode instructions are largely an expansion of that, with additional things to watch out for.