Success! I think. And no, it doesn't stop the drive going to sleep, sadly.
Information: I tried the technique detailed at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/OSX/swapfile/ ... But as per its warning, it does not work with 10.4. However, it emboldened me to try hacking directly on /etc/rc and I have triumphed. Mine is a crude hack which I do not really recommend and for which I make no guarantees whatsoever. Omitting several false starts and silly mistakes, here's what I did. As per the webpage, I repartitioned and created a 2xRAM (1.5GB in my case) dedicated swap partition in unjournalled HFS+ format, ensuring that it had no spaces in the volume name. Like the example given, mine is called "Swap" and so mounts as /Volumes/Swap. Stage 0: As that webpage warns, you should know how to boot your Mac in verbose mode and into single-user mode and get out of it again. I also recommend: - enabling the root user (Google for details, this is trivially easy); - disabling auto-login (System Preferences | Accounts); - knowing how to log in to the console, minus Quartz/Aqua (at the login box, click "Other" then enter a login name of ">console" - without the quotes - and OS X drops into text mode and asks you to authenticate the old-fashioned way, with a login prompt); - knowing how to cleanly reboot from the console (hint: "shutdown -r now") (1) Open Terminal and su to root machinename:~ username$ su Password: [type root password] machinename:/Users/username root# (2) Back up the existing /etc/rc script in case oof disaster # cd /etc # cp rc rc.bak (2) Edit rc - I used vi but Unix novices might prefer pico # vi rc or # pico vi (3) Look for the line that reads echo "Starting virtual memory" Back up any lines you change by copying the original unchanged lines and inserting a # mark in front of them to comment them out. Also put in comments - starting with a # - detailing what you did. One day, you might not remember! I changed the swapdir variable to point to my planned drive/directory and inserted a line explicitly mounting that drive on its desired mountpoint: # following lines LGHP 10-Dec-2005 swapdir=/Volumes/Swap/.vm mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s12 /Volumes/Swap # swapdir=/private/var/vm I found that it was necessary to explicitly state the format of the disk with the -t switch; OS X mount does not, it seems, auto-detect the disk format and I presume that it is defaulting to its native UFS format. Also, I left the app_profile file where it was, but inserted some lines at the end of the VM initialisation section to display a message telling me where it was swapping: # following lines LGHP 10-Dec-2005 echo "Swapping onto:" echo ${swapdir} # end insertion appprofiledir=/private/var/vm/app_profile One reboot later and all seems to be working. The default size of the file is only 64MB but that is enough to tell me it's working, as is the fact that I was able to delete the original one from /private/var/vm. However, with 768M RAM, it's not actually *using* any swap, so the drive still keeps going to sleep... -- Liam Proven · http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven AOL/AIM/iChat: [EMAIL PROTECTED] · MSN/Messenger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo: [EMAIL PROTECTED] · Skype: liamproven · ICQ: 73187508 Gmail/Google Talk/Orkut: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
