Adding swap space

sbrewer · 12-15-2004, 12:02 PM

All,

Here is the scenario. I have a machine with 2 hard drives. Nothing was on the second hard drive but the swap partition. The drive with the swap partition was removed.

There is not any additional free space on the drive that remains. If I understand correctly, one of these partitions will have to be resized and a new swap partition created.

My question is...is there a way to safely resize one of the partitions that are currently there?

TIA

sbrewer

ferrix · 12-15-2004, 01:45 PM

Yes, the tool for that is GNU Parted: http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html
Backing up your important stuff before you begin messing with partitions is always a good idea

winsnomore · 12-15-2004, 06:16 PM

Swap is not an absolute requirement. You can get by without it with 512M for normal use.

cs-cam · 12-15-2004, 06:28 PM

No it's not an absolute requirement but it's nice to have if you think you'll use more physical memory than you have available. I know I was suprised, I managed to use a bit over 800MB running fluxbox on Gentoo a while ago, I figured it would be much less but I was doing a lot of stuff..

Grobsch · 12-19-2004, 04:32 AM

You can also create a swap file instead of a swap partition...
Type:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/swaps count=128000 bs=1024 2>/dev/null
Then:
mkswap /mnt/swaps
After that start swap file:
swapon /mnt/swaps

Will work only if you have free space, and dreate a swap file with 128Mb... You don't need to change partition type or size, just create some space deleting some files...