Setup Issue - Formatting Swap partition
 

When running addswap from setup, the program has been on Formatting Swap Partition for about 4 hours now. This is a tiny HD (1.5 GB) in an old laptop.

My question is will it give me an error if it has a problem with the HD?
Or will it just run forever?

You usually get an error message but it sounds like the system is hung up because I've never seen it go for 4 hours. It's usually just a few seconds and it's done.

How old is the processor?

I saw a similar issue with my Dell Inspiron 1000. Celeron 2.2/512MB
Trying to install, took over an hour to format a 1GB swap partition on hda2. Not sure what the problem was, but it DID eventually finish and seems to be OK.

Conjecture: maybe something with the bad-block checking? The other formats that I did without error-checking worked fine.

-G

When adding swap during Slackware's install, it will always try to detect and check for bad blocks, the larger the swap, the longer it takes to format. If your drive is only 1.5 GB in size though and your swap is rather small I hope, it shouldn't take 4 hours. Switch to another console and see if the process is still running, etc.

ctrl-alt-F2 thru F6

maybe things have changed but when I installed 10.2 it was better not to format swap partion. I just added it to /etc/fstab later.

A more user-friendly solution is to provide the end user the option to format or not format the swap partition. I never understood this inconsistency in the Slackware setup utility. Users are provided the opportunity not to format all other partitions they create so why not the same approach with swap too?

Formatting all the time gets real old when users are trying to learn the Slack process and go through several installations to get the hang of things and the Slack setup forces the user to format that danged swap partition every time.

Perhaps even more of a mystery is why force users to format an already existing swap partition? The setup utility nicely auto-detects an existing swap partition. IMO, if a swap partition already exists then the likelihood of that partition already being in use and formatted is reasonably high.

All of this could be improved simply by offering users the option not to format an existing swap partition.

As this forum is the official Slackware support forum, then I hope this suggestion is forwarded to PV.