Hi I'm a newbie,

while installing linux ubuntu i used halve of my second hdd for swap , i didn't realise you use it for memory to speed up the system.
how can i unswap (sorry for the way i saying that) , reparttion it , create a partition to save my files

if my question is not clear, please have some consideration I getting to know my pc better

Just turn off your swap, repartition, and reformat to use whatever filesystem you want.

This assumes that the swap is on /dev/hdb2. Run these commands as root or sudo:
Edit /etc/fstab and remove the line that looks like this
Reboot your machine just to make triple-damned sure that you didn't bork it. Then run:
Post back for specific questions about how to do this if it's not clear.

Added:
jlightner brings up a good point. You will have to remove the swap partition in fdisk before you can add a Linux partition. Depending on how much memory you have and whether you have another swap space, you might consider putting a 512MB swap space on it, anyway.

Assuming this isn't your primary swap you can disable swap with the swapoff command (type "man swapoff" for details). Once you've turned the swap off you should be able to reuse the partition for other purposes - you'll have to change the partition type since swap is a type of its own.

Also don't forget to remove this swap device from /etc/fstab so it doesn't try to re-enable it on the next boot.

Hopefully you do have SOME swap - it helps increase your virtual memory pool - you don't actually swap out to disk (it does paging instead) but by having a larger virtual pool you can have more active processes because more memory can be preallocated. (The memory isn't actually in use - just "reserved" which is why virtual memory is a good thing.)

Shouldn't he need to restart before formatting?
The kernel normally always holds the old partition table in memory.

thnx, i let you fellows know when i done

hdparm -z /dev/foo

This will re-read the partition table.

I open a terminal run the code in sudo and it tells me : not such files or directory

can you tell what i'm doing wrong , please.

When you run in sudo, you don't have root's path. Try "sudo /sbin/hdparm -z /dev/foo".

I log in as root i put in code swapoff /dev/hdb2 and is says now: not superuser
and surely everything after i get acces denied

is someone already running my pc for me ?

If you are logged in as root, then you are the superuser. End of story. There must be some other issue that you don't understand enough to relate to us.

I'll read a bit and when i sort it, i'll be back

thnx anyway !

One thing you could do is type "id" when you are "logged into root" and give us the output.

uid=1000(takhai) gid=100(users) groups=4(adm), 20 (dialout), 24 (cdrom), 25 (floppy), 29 (audio), 30 (dip), 44 (video), 46 (plugdev), 100 (users), 104 (scanner), 112 (netdev), 113 (lpadmin), 115 (powerdev), 117 (admin)

Sorry, but you are logged into takhai, not into root.