LinuxQuestions.org - Adding more swap made system hangs

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Adding new hard drive made system hangs

See below for new information of that case
I just bought newer and bigger hard drive, and I decided to use part of it as a bigger swap. My memory now is 192MB and my old swap partition was 135MB. I made 470MB partition on the new hdd, and wrote into /etc/fstab:
/dev/hdb8 swap swap defaults 0 0
Additionaly I turned it on via swapon /dev/hdb8.
This partition is formated with mkswap /dev/hdb8.

After boot I got a message the swap is working:
Adding 136512k swap on /dev/hda5. Priority:-1 extents:1
Adding 465848k swap on /dev/hdb8. Priority:-2 extents:1

The problem is that when it is time to write in that new swap, the system hangs. It is OK when writing to the old swap.

Currently I have disabled this extra swap, but 130MB isn't enough sometimes. I want to use my other 470MB partition, too.
Do I have to turn off my old swap, and go only with the bigger partition?

NEW INFORMATION
It's not of the swap space - it is from the hard itself. Windows XP installed on that hard hangs too. Linux hangs too.
By 'hangs' I mean that the computer stops responding, picture freezes and no input is taken from kbd/mouse. I don't know if network daemons work. I can't see anything suspicious in /var/log/messages or syslog.
That ocurse after minutes of medium/heavy load. If I let torrents downloading - nothing happens for the whole night. Wathcing movie, or playing Half Life 1 made hang after 10-15 minutes of watch/play. Working on Linux (web, skype, samba, apache) made a hang after 1-2 hours.
It seems like a bus overflow error? S.M.A.R.T. values of the new hdd are OK - it is working. My system is pretty old (66Mhz FSB, ATA(33), BIOS updated in order to detect the bigger drive) - if that is important for this.
I copied a movie on my older hard, and disconnected the new one. Movie is watching OK.
I'm stuck now. Any ideas?

P.S. Current setup of IDE cables:
15GB Quantum (the old hdd) - IDE1 master - hda
120GB Seagate (the new one) - IDE1 slave - hdb
CD-RW Samsung - IDE2 slave - hdd

P.S. I'm trying to boot with new hard's power off, BUT its IDE cable connected (it shouldn't work in that way?). In that case I got DMA related errors on hda (the other hard):

Code:

hda: DMA timeout retry

hda: status error .... badcrc? seekdrive complete? don't remember exactly

.

.

.

hda: drive not ready for command

If I disconnect the IDE cable, I get no errors for hda.

Having more than swap partition is not a problem. When you created the partition (using fdisk?) did you set the partition type to Linux swap (type 82)?

Yes it is:

Code:

fdisk -l /dev/hdb



Disk /dev/hdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/hdb1              1        1275    10241406    7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/hdb2            1276      14592  106968802+  f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/hdb5            1276        8924    61440561    7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/hdb6            8925      11474    20482843+  b  W95 FAT32

/dev/hdb7          11475      14534    24579418+  83  Linux

/dev/hdb8          14535      14592      465853+  82  Linux swap

I wonder if you have a mix of old and new style of swap format.
Pat used to use the old style. Try the following, and compare the eyecatcher at the end.

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda5 count=1 skip=7

dd if=/dev/hdb8 count=1 skip=7

All modern kernel will work with SWAPSPACE2.

What do you mean by old and new style of swap?

[edit]

Code:

# dd if=/dev/hda5 count=1 skip=7                  

SWAPSPACE21+0 records in

1+0 records out

# dd if=/dev/hdb8 count=1 skip=7                  

SWAPSPACE21+0 records in

1+0 records out

I still wonder what is old and new style..

Newer information on that case is posted in the first post.
That hang problem really drives me crazy...

Can't help with the hardware - as for the different swap implementations, have a look at the manpage for mkswap.