Got dsl to work but...

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Got dsl to work but...
started by: chaud

Posted by chaud on Jan. 17 2005,23:39

I have the laptop working decent, but the thing only has 32mb ram. Is there a way I can create a swap partition on the usb key so that I can open firefox?

Posted by Mechcozmo on Jan. 19 2005,00:45

Flash-based devices (aka, USB flash drives) have a limited number of reads/writes per sector before they fail. Hard drives do not suffer from this. You would be better of making a swapfile on the hard disk, so that you do not damage the USB drive.

Posted by CHAUD on Jan. 20 2005,04:07

Good point, only problem is the hard drive is riddleled with bad sectors, seems to be dieing, how would I go about TRYING to make a swapfile on the HD.

Posted by Mechcozmo on Jan. 21 2005,00:35

There is a "Setup DOS swapfile" command. I don't know what it does.... But a swapfile is a swapfile....
Try it?
(I'd try it for you, but I care about my hard drive

)

Posted by mikshaw on Jan. 21 2005,03:12

I wouldn't say a swapfile is a swapfile...and a swapfile is also not a swap partition. You'd get much better results creating a small linux swap partition on a harddrive rather than using a swapfile on a fat partition.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Jan. 21 2005,03:23

If you know at what point , percentage-wise, the bad sectors are on your drive,
you could partition it in half ( make 2 partitions - equal size ) ,
then skip the half that has the bad sectors, and run mkswap /dev/hdXx ,
and then swapon /dev/hdXx on the good half..
( hdXx = your drive - possibly hda1 or hda2 )

That would give some swap , and a little more use out of the drive before
it fails completely.. Usually, when they start to go, they go quickly...

73
ke4nt

Posted by chaud on Jan. 22 2005,03:15

It seems to be all over the drive, what would be your best guess on how to partition it to use it. I have a suspicion that the drive head is bad....

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 23 2005,02:58

Get a new drive from a dumpster or from E-Bay.

Trying to use a failing drive to store data, even temporarily inside a swap file / swap partition is a bad idea.

You might corrupt a critical part of your memory when it gets swapped out to disk and then when you try to access that memory again it will hose your computer. Most likely it will just cause a crash and loss of in-use tasks but it could also corrupt important documents if you save your corrupted work to permanent storage media and over-write the good stuff.