hi,
i'm absolutely new to linux and have installed opensuse 10.3 right now.
there are 2 problems occuring:

1. when starting suse the screen turned absolutely black when kde should appear :-(
after "sax2 -m 0=versa" i finally get a mouse pointer on black screen before system offers command line log in ... "kde" stops with errormessage "can't contact kdeinit" and others. that's the current situation ... may be the problem is related to 2.? ok, swap is not really required but ...

2. when starting in failsafe mode (otherwise the messages are not displayed since the sax2 command) the message appears "mount: mount point swap does not exist".
"swapon -s" gives me "/dev/sda5 partition 369452 0 -1", "free -m" tells me that 360 is free but no swap is used and fstab contains 2 swap related entries:
a) "/dev/disk/by-id/...-part1 swap vfat defaults 0 0" (where ... is the internal scsi device label)
b) "/dev/disk/by-id/...-part1 swap swap defaults 0 0" (where ... is the internal scsi device label)
guess b) is /dev/sda5.

i searched the forum before questioning (as you can see in the commands i used before) but did not found (or understand) any further solutions.

so can anyone give me some hints?

thanx!

Show us the output of 'fdisk -l' and 'cat /etc/fstab' (without quotes). Fdisk will show the hard drives and their partitions and fstab will show the devices and their mount points. Any discrepancy between the two will be easy to spot.

Just a thought but the fstab line should be

b) "/dev/disk/by-id/...-part1 none swap sw defaults 0 0" (where ... is the internal scsi device label)
guess b) is /dev/sda5.

The mount point for swap is normally "none"

Never heard of using vfat as swap before. I just had similar problem with Kubuntu, swap was there originally then it disappeared. It was in still in fstab but not getting mounted. I followed suggestion from a post by AwesomeMachine "Learn The DD Command Revised" which tells you how to make a swap on the run, the main thing was the:-

mkswap /swapspace (this should be path to your swap partition)
swapon /swapspace

When I did that to my existing swap file all came right.

ok, here we are (a lot of typework on my still-windows computer):

fdisk -l:
this old windows stuff looks strange ... thought it had been killed before ... however, there is no windows available at startup and all microsoft stuff can/should/must disappear. how to?

cat /etc/fstab:
hope that serves what is needed to spot any discrepancies ...

thanx for your help!

This
is causing this error.
Basically, it means you are trying to mount a vfat filesystem in mount point called swap. But that partition is probably formated swap instead of vfat, so it's causing problems when you try to mount it.

Edit fstab to read
*DO NOT* try to remove /dev/sda2. It is an extended partition (which does not get mounted. It's a container for logical partitions sda5, sda6, and sda7).

You have two swap partitions (sda1 and sda5). You should be able to get rid of sda5 and extend sda6 to take up the free space, or use sda5 for some other purpose. If you decide to use it to extend sda6, do make a backup of sda6 first. If there are problems booting sda6 after extending it to take up the space occupied by sda5, you will have a backup that you can restore.

Of course, you have the option of re-formating sda1 for Linux instead of swap, and keep sda5 as swap.

At any rate, try the correction to fstab as mentioned above, then try a re-boot. Do you still get errors? If yes, what errors do you get?

hi bigrigdriver,

following your suggestion i just changed sda1 from vfat to swap* and it works fine! no error message any longer! thanx a lot!

i will leave the 2 swap patitions for now - never change a running system ... with more experience in linux i'll come back to this issue ...

now i have to make the system wlan-ready and go for internet - that's the main mission ;-)

thanx again!

* first time i used the vi editor ;-)

Go into YaST - Network devices to configure you wlan connection.