oddvar
I am re-reading your situation.
Do you have a live cd with a graphical or command line partition tool on it like gparted, qtparted or the cli....fdisk sfdisk cfdisk?
2) assuming swapon was not correctly run by your distro can you pls consider the following
what is the name of your distro?
pls post the full /etc/fstab
what is the ouput of the live cd for say gparted?
can you post your /dev/disk/by-uuid
3) leaping ahead there are some things you could try.
in the live cd....once you have confirmed the correct uuid you could edit your hard drive fstab.
you could boot up your system and run the swapon command if swap is not showing up?
I am currently using sidux and its automatic script to enable all swaps in fstab is found at
/etc/rcS.d/S35mountall.sh
good luck