Cant set up Swap Memory

Question

My system was recently locking up, and I realized that all my ram was all used up. I then inserted an old Hard drive and made an 8gb swap partition to compensate. Swap memory is "not avaliable" which means I need to activate it. How do I do so?

Answer 1

Best way to accomplish this permanently is adding a correct line in your /etc/fstab file pointing to the swap partition you created. Then run swapon -a.

Such a line in fstab should look similar to this:

UUID=4139a640-c32e-4e88-b275-75c77722da7c none            swap    sw              0       0

Find the UUID of your swap partition by running blkid and replace it accordingly.

It is also possible to activate it temporarily using swapon by pointing it to the partition directly (see manpage). After reboot it will not be activated again automatically.

Answer 2

1) Setup swap partition on your drive (You can as well setup Swap file on your current drive)... So: start Gparted and set a partition and make it as swap

2) You can activate it manually by command:

swapon PARTITION_NAME

where PARTITION_NAME is something like /dev/sdb1 (according to your drives, check it out correctly)

Now you should find mention of this swap in /proc/swaps

3) You can activate it permanently by editing /etc/fstab Ad line like this:

PARTITION_NAME  swap  swap defaults 0 0

where again PARTITION_NAME is something like /dev/sdb1 (according to your drives, check it out correctly)