Hi,

I am new to Linux, and have purchased, and am having trouble enabling the swap partition on my mandrake 9.0 installation. The problem seems to be in 'fstab'. When linux is booting, an error appears invlaid argument whilst trying to mount the swap space (I think that's what its trying to do). What is the correct syntax for a swap entry in fstab?

The system has already been installed, and otherwise seems to be functioning fine. There is no Windows installation on the box.

The problem is kind of frustrating, as the machine is reasonably speced, but when there are a few big apps open, it tends to grind to a halt.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Mark

/dev/hdaX swap swap defaults 0 0

Replace the X with the number of your swap
partition ....


easy way to find it is



for IDE-drives

fdisk -l /dev/sdX | grep swap

for SCSI ...

HIH

Cheers,
Tink

Hi Tink,

That didn't work. The contents of my frive space appears as follows
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 * 1 388 3116578+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 389 2434 16434495 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 389 438 401593+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 439 2434 16032838+ 83 Linux
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

which seems kind of weird to me, I haven't seen these kind of paths before?!?

So when I tried adding the following line to my fstab:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 swap swap defaults 0 0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I still get the error 'Invalid argument' when booting.

NB. I get just the same error, if after booting I do the following command:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[root@localhost mark]# swapon -a
swapon: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5: Invalid argument
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Any idea what's going on here? - it's got me stumped.

Cheers,
Mark

Howdy,
If you have the src installed take a look at
<src.root>/Documentation/filesystems/devfs/README
(might be under /usr/src/linux ) ?
Otherwise google for it
Apparently the device names have changed under defvs to give more flexibility for ide & scsi instead of the old /dev/hda & /dev/sda
Can you check your version of modutils ?
rpm -q modutils
and check mkswap --version
HTH
Ian