swap area needs to be atleast 40 kB
 

On /dev/hda2 I have a 500 mb primary Linux swap (82) partition. I want to format it with mkswap so I type "mkswap /dev/hda2" but it returns "error: swap area needs to be atleast 40 kB". There is no swap partition in /proc/swaps because I typed "swapoff -a" and I have removed the reference to the old swap partition from /etc/fstab. So why cant I create a swap partition there?

Thanks

Is this a newly created partition? Just in case you might want to reboot so linux will use the new partition table.