Root file system read write mount

Today I had to change the mount of a virtual machine.
I umounted the partition, howerver, I forgot to remove its mount line from /etc/fstab.

After I shutdown the machine, I removed the 4 GB physical(i.e virtual) disk from the Virtual Machine.
And then I added another partition of about 5.5 GB.

Then I rebooted the machine.

However, because of my not removing the entry from fstab, the boot failed, and the system went in read only mode.

I wanted to edit the fstab, but was not able to because of the read only mount of the root partition /

I then searched google, and found the way to mount the partition read-write in the following way


i.e. of the root filesystem is currently mounted read only, to remount it read-write, give the following command, at the root prompt.

#mount -n -o remount rw /

After this I was able to edit /etc/fstab - and the machine booted successfully.