[gentoo-user] '/' mounted write protected on first boot of vbox gentoo as guest

[Harry Putnam]

I installed gentoo in a vbox vm as guest.

It boots successfully but is mounted write protected.

I didn't see anything in dmesg that I recognized as pointing to the
problem.

Thought it might be a timing issue during boot processes and so tried
to remount rw with `mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda3 /' with the message
that it cannot since it is write protected.

Suspected some doltishness on my part in /etc/fstab, but if so I could
not see it.  Cannot run sshd since it requires writing the keys etc so
sshd will not start.

I can log in as root and my user but cannot make any changes.

<Stopping this post to boot with systemrescueCD so I can post my fstab.>

cat /etc/fstab <trimmed>

  # <fs>         <mountpoint>   <type>      <opts>      <dump/pass>

  # NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
  /dev/sda1      /boot        ext2      noauto,noatime  1     2
  /dev/sda3      /            ext4      noatime         0     1
  /dev/sda2      none         swap      sw              0     0
  /dev/cdrom     /media       auto      noauto,ro       0     0
-------       -------       ---=---       -------       -------

How can I go about finding the source of the problem?