Swap paritition??

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Swap paritition??
started by: ursixc9

Posted by ursixc9 on Dec. 08 2003,19:55

Hi, I paritition my HD with 1000 meg in hda1 and 200 meg in hda5. I installed DSL in hda1 already but my question is, How do I know if the DSL is using hda5 as a swap paritition?? And how do I check how many megs do I have left in each drive? I don't even have the option to mount hda5 in the file manager. Thanks.

Posted by DrWatt on Dec. 08 2003,20:36

I am not sure why you can't mount hda5, but if you right click on the desktop and choose enhance a graphical system monitor will appear. Mine seems to accurately show my swap space. For partititions you can mount there is a button on Emelfm that shows available disk space.

Posted by roberts on Dec. 08 2003,21:55

You can use a shell window and type
free

It will show if you have a swap.

If you only partitioned for a swap, I think you said /dev/hda5, then
you need to prepare it for swap. As root type
mkswap /dev/hda5

You can reboot and the system will use your new swap partition.

Posted by Gilbert Ashley on Dec. 08 2003,22:46

swapon -s will list all active swap partitions or files
df -h will quickly tell you about freespace on your drives
Did you specify partition type 82 for swap?

Posted by ursixc9 on Dec. 09 2003,05:05

I used swapon -s but there is nothing, tried to use the mkswap command 'mkswap /dev/hda5' as root but it don't seem like they can find that partition. I partition it before installing DSL on harddrive with cfdisk. I remember it's hda1 and hda5, the program picked the hda5 for me... and I don't know if i specify partition type 82 for swap... how do I do that?? BTW thanks for everyone's help so far.

Posted by DrWatt on Dec. 09 2003,05:16

Drop out of X (exit on the menu). This will make you root. Then type:

cfdisk

cfdisk should be self explanatory to you. After you are done, reboot to make sure the partition changes took. At least that is the way I do it.

Posted by ursixc9 on Dec. 09 2003,05:58

Thanks everyone I got it to work!!!

Posted by skaos on Dec. 09 2003,12:19

To "mount" swap automatically at boot, you could add the following line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0