[Solved] Failing to initialize swap?

Question

I have been rebooting alot recently when I noticed that on boot up it was failing to initialize swap!
I used the command free and it returned that swap had zero space! what is going on?
here is my fstab for reference.
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda2 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda3 /home ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
did it not get formatted properly in the install or something?
Last edited by semperfiguy (2007-12-28 14:52:28)

Answer 1

Since this is coming up in the Google results concerning this message, I thought I'd mention a solution to a related problem. In my case, Linux seemed to be renumbering the drives at some point before initializing swap so the swap partition was renamed from /dev/sda2 to /dev/sdc2 and /dev/sda2 became an NTFS partition on another drive. Since /etc/fstab listed /dev/sda2 as swap, and /dev/sda2 now pointed to a partition on another drive, the OS failed to initialize swap.
What seemed to work for me was to change the line in /etc/fstab
/dev/sda2             none            swap            defaults        0 0
to
UUID=50e1a18a-d1d5-452b-99cb-69408befc029       none            swap            defaults        0 0
You'll need to figure out the UUID of your swap partition (it may be listed in /etc/fstab). These are randomly generated when you do mkswap. Just make sure you don't mkswap on the wrong drive because of this renumbering!