I tried googling and checking docs but couldn't find anything relevant. I have 2 swap partitions, /dev/sda6, /dev/sda7. 1 GB of Ram I wanted to wipe my swap partitions, so I did swapoff /dev/sda7, then dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda7, then mkswap /dev/sda7, then swapon /dev/sda7 With swapon /dev/sda7, I get the following error message: # swapon /dev/sda swapon: /dev/sda7: Invalid argument
I noticed afterward that mkswap made a swap that was considerably smaller than the 1 GB allotted to each of the two swap partitions, it was only about 200-250 MB in size, it should have been 996 MB (just under 1 GB formatted) or so in size. Don't have the error message available. The only google item I found for this was old info on old pre 2.2 or 2.0 kernels with older version of swap vs. newer version of swap, with mkswap now defaulting to the new version so this shouldn't be an issue. I added the swapfile (/swapfile0) after I had problems with swapon /dev/sda7 I also did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda7 to try the whole procedure again and swapon /dev/sda7 still fails with the same error message. But the /dev/sda7 partition is now showing the correct size, ie: 1 GB after dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda7 or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda7 is run. I haven't rebooted yet (I have a lot of apps I don't want to close yet and the laptop is temporarily serving some web sites). So I don't know if that will fix things, but I also modified the swapon start up script so it encrypts the swap partitions with cryptsetup, so I may not be able to diagnose the problem by rebooting unless I change everything back. -------------------- Any ideas for what I can do without rebooting would be appreciated, why is swapon failing with no error messages in /var/log/messages? (or kern.log) Any help is appreciated. Diane. -------------------- I tried fdisk -l and cfdisk both were segfaulting yesterday, but cfdisk /dev/sda just gave me this: GNU cfdisk 1.0 ATA Hitachi HTS54161 Disk: /dev/sda Disk type: msdos Size: 160041885695B, 160042MB Heads: 255 Sectors per track: 63 Cylinders: 19457 Number Flags Part Type Filesystem Label Size ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ None Free space 1.02MB 1 Primary ntfs 1573MB 2 Bootable Primary ntfs 75000MB None Free space 3.44MB 3 Primary reiserfs 28994MB 4 Extended 53497MB 5 Logical reiserfs 24997MB 6 Logical linux-swap 1003MB 7 Logical linux-swap 1003MB 8 Logical [Linux] 17997MB 9 Logical fat32 8497MB None Free space 971MB ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fdisk is still segfaulting: # fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 160 GB, 160039272960 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System Segmentation fault --------------------------- Debian Etch, 2.6.22-4-amd64 #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 10:29:27 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux Toshiba A215-S7422 laptop --------------------------- $ cat /etc/fstab # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/sda1 /vistaback ntfs 0 0 /dev/sda2 /vista ntfs 0 0 /dev/sda3 / reiserfs notail,noatime 0 1 /dev/sda9 /fat32windows vfat defaults 0 0 /dev/sda5 /home reiserfs notail,noatime 0 2 /dev/sda6 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/sda7 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/hda /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0 /swapfile0 swap swap defaults 0 0 ---------------------------- # cat /proc/swaps Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/sda6 partition 979924 711140 -1 /swapfile0 file 1048568 0 -4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 899024 888660 10364 0 53996 138940 -/+ buffers/cache: 695724 203300 Swap: 2028492 711140 1317352 Any other info needed?