Read-only operation, in my experience, has always been a symptom of a drive not being validated. Do you have DOpus4 on the machine? Point one of the listers to SYS: or another partition. If it's a validation issue, the free space indicator should be in parentheses (indicating write-protected), or say 0K, or 512K, or some other obviously-wrong value (don't remember exactly which one).
Hopefully this secondary guage of validation status gives you some more clues...
