swapon : /dev/hdc6 : invalid argument

trutnev · 03-06-2004, 03:50 AM

Hello,

while booting in RH9.0, I get this message:

Activating swap partition : swapon : /dev/hdc6 : invalid argument

What does it mean ?

Thank you.

meldar · 03-06-2004, 07:26 AM

It means that it cant activate any virtual memory (the so-called swap). Do you have any swap-partitions? If not, and if you haven't too much memory, you could increase the overall performance by adding a swap-partition. Don't know how to set the right partition on boot in Red Hat, but try to dig a little in the init-files.

twescott · 06-08-2004, 08:29 PM

I had the same problem after upgrading a dead motherboard/processor. Somehow the system "forgot" that /dev/hda8 was a swap partition, even though it showed up as swap when I ran fdisk.

The solution is to manually tag the partition as a swap:

/sbin/mkswap /dev/hdxx # note mkswap may be somewhere else, I have RH 8

You can then check to see if it worked by manually mounting the swap partion:

/sbin/swapon /dev/hdxx

Hope this helps.

Thom

aeolus · 06-08-2004, 09:57 PM

I also give you some advice.You can check /etc/fstab file and whether it is right or not.Example as:
/dev/hda* swap swap defaults 0 0