I've been trolling through these forums and although I have tried several of the solutions to my problem, but I have yet to find an actually working solution.

Ubuntu Fails to Activate my Swap partition. I know the usual fstab trick, but as far as I can tell it is correct. anyway here is my information, any help would be greatly appreciated.

fdisk -l output:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8f800000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 486 3903763+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 * 487 3525 24410767+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 3526 20486 136239232+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 20487 30402 79642624 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5 3526 20486 136239201 83 Linux



fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda2
UUID=db128f1e-d47d-4644-bc54-cd4d0002c3d5 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=9092d85c-f434-4aa1-877c-c0c0e3120fb3 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda4 /media/sda4 ntfs nls=iso8859-1,users,user,owner 0 0
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 ext3 defaults 0 0

free output:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3046004 952168 2093836 0 25452 374664
-/+ buffers/cache: 552052 2493952
Swap: 3903752 0 3903752

What output do you get when you run:

when I run swapon -a it seems to do nothing. I have also ran it under sudo with the same thing...it just goes to another line in the command prompt and gives me no further information...but when I check free it has not done anything.

What do you mean fails to activate?

It states that you have > 3GB swap, unused. How's that a failure?

The swap partition exists, but it is not being used by the operating system. During the boot process the only failure that I get is during the activating swap phase. I'm fairly sure that just because the partition exists doesn't mean that it is being used.

You are badly misunderstanding the help being offered - I suggest you read it again.
You have a swap partition, it is mounted and available for use (as per Tinks post), but has not been required. So in that sense, it isn't being used - this is a good thing.

Post the error you see - and all other messages related to swap.

Ummm ... observe the different output of free:
If your swap partition wasn't being picked up by the OS you'd
see
on your machine instead of