problem creating swap partition during installation
 

Hello there,
I am having problems to create a swap partition during redhat 9 installation.
This is my partition:

/boot 75MB ext3
/ 2800MB ext3
/home 1400MB ext3
/swap 300MB ext2

I am then told that I should create a swap partition.
I really don't get it.
Thanks for helping me.
kristof

The swap partition must be Linux 82 - Linux swap, not ext2

edit: I forgot to add - remove that present /swap directory first
by issuing, as root,
# rm -rf /swap
and afterwards create your swap.

Or maybe you haven't created it yet since you say whilst installing.

Welcome to LQ!

I see but what shall i type in mounting point? And there are only two options: ext2 and ext3?
thanks

Something's not right with this picture. I only used RedHat a month or so, and can't remember
how that install goes. However, there should be some documentation on installing it; and the
installer should understand how to install a swap partition. I'm not sure I can explain it, but swap
doesn't actually have a "mount point," which is why I say something is wrong here.

Have you actually got it installed yet? I should think not without a swap partition. If you don't,
is there a way you can go back in the installation procedure, or start over? Because you really
need that swap partition. To Linux, swap is virtual memory. When your processes use all of the
physical memory you have, then it pages to swap, or virtual memory. Therefore, swap has no
need of a "mount point," as it's not really even "mountable."

shall i just leave free space and it will automatically know that it is reserved for swap partition?
I really dont get it
kristof

Do you have documentation that tells you how to install? Is there a Help button
somewhere? I'm not familiar with acutally "installing RedHat," but I do think the
installer knows to create a swap partition. If nothing else, you can start over
knowing you need to create a swap partition. Make it 512MB.

read this document
 

thanks Chinaman,
You are right, the installation program knows what is a swap partition (thanks god) and it can be selected in graphical installation. I just have problems with the mouse that is not centered and i cant access the menu for some reasons. But every thing is alright now (appart from the mouse).
thanks a lot
kristof

Don't know if I could help, but what do you mean by "the mouse is not centered?"
and what menu can you not access...

well the mouse points to a location which was not the same location as the mouse's icon. At first I was just navigating with the tabs and arrows and couldnot access the file system menu. It is very silly I know but it stopped me for a couple of hours.
My problem now is that I need a floppy to boot redhat. I thought I had pointed to the right place but apparently not.
what is the command to view partition? fdisk does not work...
kristof

As root issue "fdisk -l" and if that doesn't work use "/sbin/fdisk -l"
bash-2.05b$ man fdisk
For a human readable printout of your mounted filesystems issue "df -h"
bash-2.05b$ man df
I don't have a clue about that mouse issue. Don't even know how to understand
"the mouse points to a location which was not the same location as the mouse's icon."

As far as booting RedHat, if you're using GRUB I can't help you there, either. Never
could understand GRUB myself - just use LILO. It's straight forward IMO. But you
should also be able to find plenty of information about setting up GRUB.

you don't make a /swap partition, you do it like this

/
/boot
/home
then leave the rest as free space and you should be prompted to make a swap partition or you can make one but it's just swap there isn't a /swap