MISSING ... Swap Partition

[jamesbandido]

i did a sudo fdisk -l on my office issued laptop and here is the output :

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xeb36eb36

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2432 19535008+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 2433 4864 19535040 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 2433 3648 9759928+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 3649 4864 9767488+ 83 Linux

okay, seems that somebody in my tech support dept messed up bigtime and did not install swap ... since it doesnt show up (or is it invisible ?)

the box is using windows xp and ubuntu 8.04 ...

if swap is indeed missing, is there a way i can install swap without reformatting or reinstalling ?

thanks in advance.

[ph34r]

Yup, you can use a file instead of a partition

Boot to Linux
Log in as root
Go somewhere convienent - I put mine on the root directory - and create a file with all 0s in it

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=500000

This creates a 500mb file.

Then make it a swapfile -

mkswap /swapfile

Then enable it
swapon /swapfile

Then you'll want an entry in /etc/fstab for it as well... same as a regular swap partition, but instead of a /dev/... device just put the path to the swapfile.

[jamesbandido]

this is my output ...

500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
512000000 bytes (512 MB) copied, 59.3131 s, 8.6 MB/s
root@bandido-laptop:~# mkswap /swapfile
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 511995 kB
no label, UUID=8f37e2f8-052d-4920-8b3d-82fd9bae7453

Then you'll want an entry in /etc/fstab for it as well... same as a regular swap partition, but instead of a /dev/... device just put the path to the swapfile

how do i do this ?

this is the contents of my fstab ...

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda6
UUID=1e31cd41-b817-4f95-a1f5-8216f78447b2 /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda1
UUID=9CE01874E01856BC /media/sda1     ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=5060751A607507CC /media/sda5     ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0       0

[jamesbandido]

i added the following to my fstab ...

/swapfile       none    swap    sw      0       0

i hope its correct ...

[ph34r]

looks proper to me. just be sure it is *after* your root partition, since htey will both load on hte first pass, you want / mounted before you try to activate /swapfile

[jamesbandido]

@ph34r, thanks very much !!!

consider this thread as case closed

have a nice weekend !!!