P4, 2 80gb drives in raid1, 1gb mem

Had a bad swap partition on one drive. Using gparted I copied a good swap to the bad drive. Neither swap partition is active now. Tried swapon from gparted as well as the console and got a "invalid argument" each time.

I have no swap and my system is struggling. How do I activate these swap partitions?

Sure could use some help.....

You have a whole gig of ram and your system needs swap??

# echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Of course, while this is probably what you need, it doesn't answer your question.

What was it about the partition that made it "bad"?
"copied"?? Why not use gparted to re-create the swap partition?
... this is a real puzzle. Have you seen:
http://lissot.net/partition/partition-08.html
... check your /etc/fstab against fdisk -l to make sure the swap partitions are correctly entered. (Show me if you got confused or uncertain.)

If you really need swap, then you should create a swap file while troubleshooting.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/my_swap bs=1024 count=131072
and activate it
mkswap -f /var/my_swap
swapon /var/my_swap

A lot of us with 2gb of ram still need swap. It just depends on what you are doing.

Other than that I am with Simon.

I'm sure I am confusing things. Here is what I know. My screen on occasion would gray out while an operation was going on and if you watched the system monitor in the upper panel it would be full. When the system caught up the gray would go away. I wondered what was going on thus I ran gparted to check out my Raid drives. /dev/sda showed that there was an alert symbol in the swap partition. Basically the swap partition was not in use or corrupt. The other drive was ok. I experimented and copied the "good" swap partition in /dev/sdb to /dev/sda. Confused yet? Now both partitions will not respond to the swapon command and issue a "invalid argument.

So I'd like to return the system to normal.

Why swap? That is how someone set it up for me.

See below;

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00051b2f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 6687 53713296 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda2 6688 9605 23438835 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda3 9606 9702 779152+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 6687 53713296 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb2 6688 9605 23438835 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb3 9606 9702 779152+ fd Linux raid autodetect

Disk /dev/md0: 55.0 GB, 55002333184 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 13428304 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Disk /dev/md1: 24.0 GB, 24001249280 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 5859680 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/md1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

There is only one swap partition in there dude. Check with /etc/fstab to see how it is mounted.
Use

swapoff -a then swapon -a

... hmmm, in my system monitor, the upper panel is for CPU useage. The middle panel is memory with a trace for swap and another for RAM. Mine is sitting around 50% swap and 70% RAM (512MiB) and the cpu barely cracks 2% with swappiness 10.

But what you seem to be reporting is max cpu load, not maxed out swap. However, if you see maxed out RAM and no swap use... make a swap file to use in the interim.

But, basically: you need to repair your RAID.
The purpose of your RAID appears to be to increase read/write speed on a single drive. Now it is bad, this speed will be incredibly slow.

Maintaining Linux RAID
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=910...404a/0404a.htm

Related thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-linux-412510/

I normally encorage a rethink about why you need RAID.

Actually I would like to revert to a single drive with some sort of scheme to use the second drive as a backup. Perhaps there is a howto that would assist me in doing that.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/md0 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/md1 /dvdbackup ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/md2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/dvd+rw udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda /media/usb0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sdb /media/usb1 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

Yeah - you backup and reinstall.

I've been lazy and run cp with the archive flag to backup my /home directory. Used to have a more elaborate method involving tar, which supports incremental backups too.

Good luck.

actually, is there a way to get the swap working on one drive then I can reformat the other one?

If you are trying to reconstruct the data of the swap partition. Forget it. Just run mkswap on the swap partition and then use swapon to activate the swap partition. To ease mounting swap partitions or any other partition from a SCSI drive, I suggest specify a label while formating.

If the partition table information has strange start and end values for the swap partition, then backup the data on all partitions and edit the partitions.

If someone setup for you, then they do not know anything about Linux. For one thing software RAID from the controller is not reliable and stable in Linux. I recommend use Linux software RAID instead. The CD drive is /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. A device node /dev/scd is the old way using SCSI emulation for IDE optical drives. Also USB storage devices needs a partition number because it can not mount RAW partitions such as /dev/sda. I do not recommend including USB and IEEE-1394 storage mediums in /etc/fstab because it will create confusion and unpredictable problems. I recommend use dbus, hal, or udev to help mount USB and IEEE-1394 storage devices.

this was a software raid1 setup. dev/sda swap partition went bad. I replaced it by deleting the bad one and using gparted replaced it. The new swap partition is not showing it as being a raid swap partition. Confused? Me too.

see below

$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md2 : active raid1 sda3[1]
779072 blocks [2/1] [_U]

md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
23438720 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
53713216 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>