I run Ubuntu 18.04 in a VMWare virtual machine. Something has happened that caused there to apparently be an I/O problem. Every time I boot the machine, after only about 1 minute, the entire filesystem /dev/sda1 gets placed into read-only mode, presumably by the kernel.
I've rebooted, and when I reboot, I'm brought to an initramfs prompt, in which I then have tried the advice on How to fix "sudo: unable to open ... Read-only file system"? except for remounting, because I don't want to do this if the kernel has indeed placed it into ro for data integrity protection.
When I run fsck -yf /dev/sda1, it fixes some inode errors and a couple other issues, then I run again, same thing, then finally, no more errors... I continue the boot process, and about 1 or 2 minutes in, the whole filesystem locks again. I can't even insert a drive to copy files to because it cannot mount on a read-only file system. I can't go to websites to upload my files because the browsers won't work on read-only file system, etc...
What I want to do at this point is back up the data, so I'm wondering how I can do this as this is a VMWare VM, it is not on bare-metal. On bare-metal, I'd probably insert a LiveCD and try to boot into it, but am unsure how to do this for VMWare and if there may be an alternate option. The disk is a virtual VMWare disk, and there are no physical problems with my underlying hardware, as my other VMs and host machine are fine.
