Can't mount my swap partition

eantoranz · 09-20-2007, 09:34 AM

Why can't I mount my swap partition on gutsy?

I noticed I had no active swap yesterday. It was working normally some days ago (on gutsy, I updated... and keep doing it... about two months ago).

Code:

$ LANG=en sudo swapon -a
swapon: /dev/sda6: Invalid argument

From fstab:

Code:

$ cat /etc/fstab | grep sda6
/dev/sda6 none            swap    sw              0       0

And from fdisk

Code:

$ sudo fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders, total 160086528 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x28d028cf

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    26624063    13312000+   7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2        26624064    40965749     7170843   8e  Linux LVM
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3        40965750   134897804    46966027+   7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda4       134897805   160071659    12586927+   5  Extended
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5       134897868   145388249     5245191   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       145388313   146962619      787153+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7       146962683   147492764      265041    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda8       147492828   160071659     6289416   83  Linux

I don't like the "Partition # does not end on cylinder boundary.) but what do you think? Shouldn't it mount?

matthewg42 · 09-20-2007, 09:54 AM

Maybe it is not formatted as a swap partition. So be very careful and see if there is actually data there which you might want! Using it as swap space will permanently delete anything on the partition.

If you are 100% sure the partition contains nothing that you want, you can run mkswap on it to prepare it for use as swap space.

eantoranz · 09-20-2007, 10:14 AM

You solved it man. mkswap and swapon did the trick. But I wonder why the partition blew up. Amyway.. thanks.

matthewg42 · 09-20-2007, 10:24 AM

Maybe it's worth running mkswap with the -c option to check for bad blocks. It could be your partition became un-identifiable as swap space because your HDD is failing.