re swaps.....

Forum: HD Install
Topic: re swaps.....
started by: mpie

Posted by mpie on Aug. 06 2004,16:14

erm curious one this after my last reinstall i had a third partition which i cfdisked to a swap partition 128mb (twice ram size) but when i mkswap it tels me the file is to small if i just swapon-a nothing happen's although the system acknowledges the swap partition. Any ideas....??

Posted by ke4nt1 on Aug. 06 2004,17:57

It may be in how you MAKE your partitions... Let me explain...

I was repartitioning a drive that had a fat32 section as the third partition on the drive itself.

I dumped the first two partitions, in favor of combining them into one larger partition.

I added 2 more partitions to the tail end of the drive, the last one being a swap partition..

All the new partitions were formatted...

Mounting them would frequently give me errors about unchecked file system...?? ??
In cfdisk, everything looked fine... but NO !!!

Frugal installs would FAIL, stating no ext2 found! WHAT ?!
HDInstalls would FAIL , stating the same error.. ?? ??
Back in to cfdisk... all is fine , linux areas are 83 - ext2
Tried to mkswap - all OK, then what is the dang deal ??

back to cfdisk, and then I saw it...
A message like this at the bottom of the screen..
" partitions not in order "

?? the screen in cfdisk shows..
hda1
hda2
hda3
hda4
??

looking at the block numbers, there were two out of sequence..
That original fat32 area was screwing things up, even though cfdisk looked fine...

So I removed the hda1, hda3, and hda4, and made two drives out of what was hda1 again..

I remade the two partitions on the tail end, but now they were hda5 and hda6 , hda4 was the extended area.

I dumped all the data from the fat32 area to the hda1...

Then removed the fat32 and all the others as well..

Now there is only one partition - hda1 ..starting at block 0
Began adding the partitions back in one-by-one...
..I excluded the fat32 for now... I don't think it makes much difference..

Tried again... all is well now... no more problems with installs.

My lesson,
A. backup your data FIRST..
B. It's best to start from a fresh, empty drive when partitioning,
unless your simply adding a new area to the tail end of the drive..

I'm not sure how accurate my facts are here, as this happened a
week or so ago, but you'll get the idea of what I'm talkin about.

73
ke4nt

Posted by mpie on Aug. 06 2004,18:23

ah that may explain it its in hda2 not hda3 i'll give it a whirl