my swap partition not recognized

[matthew]

When I installed Hoary I didn't make a swap partition because with 1Gb of RAM I didn't think it would be necessary. Now I want one so I can try to get hibernate to work. I created a swap partition, but when I run the free command this is what it shows:

total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1035992 519776 516216 0 36152 198960 -/+ buffers/cache: 284664 751328 Swap: 0 0 0

I would guess this means the partition is not formatted properly or is at least not being used. What should I do now?

More info...here's my disk partition setup:

Size: 80 Gb Hdd, currently dual booting Ubuntu with Win XP Partitions: Name/type/size/mountpoint hda1 ntfs 15.3 Gb WinXP *mounts read-only as /media/windows in ubuntu hda2 ext3 10 Gb / hda3 ext3 30.5 Gb /home hda4 extended, includes hda5 & hda6 hda5 fat32 19.4 Gb /home/matt/music hda6 linux-swap 1 Gb hda5 and 6 used to be part of hda1's ntfs partition. As I am using XP less and less I decided to remove space from its partition and make a shared space accessible from both. Since I am now using XP for almost nothing, hda5 holds my mp3s and almost nothing else.

[jasmuz]

You must tell the machine that you have a swap partition now.

on the command line you can type swapon /dev/hda6

And make your entry into /etc/fstab, like this.

/dev/hda6 none swap sw 0 0

That does it.

[matthew]

Thanks for the reply.

For the command - swapon /dev/hda6 - here is the output:

swapon: /dev/hda6: Operation not permitted

I took a look and this was already in my /etc/fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda1 /media/windows ntfs nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0 /dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 0 2 /dev/hda5 /home/matt/music vfat iocharset=utf8,umask=000 0 3 /dev/hda6 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0

What should I check next?

[dradul]

Originally Posted by matthew Thanks for the reply. For the command - swapon /dev/hda6 - here is the output: I took a look and this was already in my /etc/fstab: What should I check next?

sudo swapon /dev/hda6

does the trick. Reboot and your done.

[matthew]

Nope. Here's the output. BTW, it didn't matter if I used "sudo swapon /dev/hda6" or "sudo swapon -a"

swapon: /dev/hda6: Invalid argument

[matthew]

I found the answer!!

I couldn't turn the swap on because it had never officially been made. Here's the code:

sudo mkswap /dev/hda6

Then I could do this and have it work:

sudo swapon -a

To be certain I typed "free" and this is what was output:

total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1035992 466208 569784 0 33588 184764 -/+ buffers/cache: 247856 788136 Swap: 1060248 0 1060248

Thanks to all who helped put me on the right track!

[Firetech]

Strange. I experienced the same thing (and the solution here solved it).
The thing that makes me confused is that I'm sure the swap partition worked earlier...
It might be the fact that I have my swap partition on LVM an that I shrinked another logical volume last night... It might also be that I tried the acpi hibernation.sh script earlier, and that didn't work (just did a "bad" shutdown...).
But as I said, the solution here ("mkswap [device]" and then "swapon -a") solved it.

[matthew]

Very cool. Glad that helped you out. I would guess that the swap file was deactivated when you resized and as you discovered just needed to be reactivated.

[art]

Hi guys
Since we are talking about swap and hibernation, let me ask a question... I have a swap 512 Mb, and since my hibernation is not working, I thought maybe it's because of swap being too small. Anyone knows how can I resize the swap partition, make it bigger?
Thanks a lot.

[matthew]

You can use the install disk to do this. Boot from it and get to the partitioner. Resize as you want and then stop the installation before it goes further. You need to do this because you cannot resize an active partition. If you don't want to do it from the installer, I believe gparted or qparted is included on the live cd and I know qparted is included on the Knoppix cd.

Your swap partition will need space next to it if you are to enlarge it. See what partitions are adjacent first and if any of them may be resized slightly to give room for the increase.

Read this for a little more detailed info.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/forum/installation/Partitioning