activating swap partition

fobius · 02-06-2004, 12:13 PM

i've just upgraded my kernel to 2.6.2 but for some reason I'm having trouble mounting my swap partitions during boot time. I'm using Mandrake 9.2, which I believe had been including supermount in their kernels; I'm not sure a plain kernel includes supermount features. Anyway, I get a boot time error message that says the mounting of my swap partitions failed. i've looked in /etc/fstab too and i do have my swap partitions listed there as well. how do i fix this?

ter_roshak · 02-06-2004, 12:29 PM

Would you show what you get for an error message at boot time and your fstab contents? Thanks. Also, can you activate your swap partitions manually after boot?

-Josh

fobius · 02-06-2004, 06:15 PM

ok here goes:

fstab:

Code:

/dev/hda9 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda11 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda10 swap swap defaults 0 0

the boot time error message tells me that when it's activating my swap partition, (/dev/hda7) with swapon, /dev/hda7 seems to be an invalid argument. here's the output of fdisk -l:

Code:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       638   5124703+   b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2           639      4865  33953377+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5           639      3443  22531131    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6          4766      4811    369463+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7          4812      4821     80293+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda8          4822      4865    353398+  83  Linux
/dev/hda9          3444      4207   6136798+  83  Linux
/dev/hda10         4208      4270    506016   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda11         4271      4765   3976056   83  Linux

i've tried using

Code:

 swapon /dev/hda7

and it also tells me that /dev/hda7 is an invalid argument.

tearinox · 02-06-2004, 09:32 PM

make sure your root!

swapon /dev/hda7

or

swapon /dev/hda10

That should work

michaelk · 02-06-2004, 09:41 PM

Check with the command ls -l /dev/hda*. Do you have a /dev/hda7 device?

My /dev/hda devices are actually symlinks to /dev/ide//host0/bus0/lun0/part(1 for hda1 etc).

ter_roshak · 02-06-2004, 09:49 PM

Another way to find out which drives you have available and their designators would be to type the following: dmesg | grep hd

Then you would see a list of devices that you can configure.

-Josh

benjaminrtz · 02-06-2004, 10:14 PM

How abt doing a mkswap again on ur swap partitions ? HTH!

fobius · 02-07-2004, 03:21 AM

i tried doing dmesg | grep hd and i noticed that there was a message about my /dev/hda7 being an old swap and that I should do 'mkswap -v1 /dev/hda7' to change it to a new swap style. then I did swapon /dev/hda7. it seems to be working now, but under my 2.4.21 kernel, it seems that I have more swap space and that that more of it was being used. could this be due to the fact that I let Mandrake install my 2.4.21 kernel and it included a whole bunch of extra stuff that I didn't really need?

ter_roshak · 02-07-2004, 10:28 AM

I'm sure that Mandrake did install a whole bunch of stuff that you didn't need... If you have less and are using less, I'd say that's a good thing...unless you're using all that you have.

-Josh