[plug] HELP! servers boots in ro mode only

[sol]

I've got a nasty problem I don't know how to solve. I've got a PC 
running as a network server that boots in read-only mode. There are 
certainly errors in some of the blocks. (I think this problem was caused 
by two power outages in quick succession, the second whilst the machine 
was rebooting.) It has an ext3 filesystem and e2fsck doesn't seem to 
work. If I could just get it to mount in rw mode I'd be able to fix 
everything else I think. I've tried:
mount -t ext3 rw /dev/hda2    #the boot sector
mount -t ext3 rw /dev/hda3     #the root partition
But nothing on the hard drives seems to mount. Have I done something 
wrong here? Or am I on the wrong track?

In conjunction with this I was wondering (because "rm" didn't seem to 
work and there was no way to log onto gnome, yet "ls" and "less" did 
work) what executables work? Is it apps that involve reading only, or is 
it apps in /bin or /sbin or something like that?

Any help greatly appreciated.

sol