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I am on Ubuntu 12.04, Thinkpad Edge 13, encrypted home. A message in the System Monitor tells me that swap is "not available". I can get it back using the swapon option in gparted (I thought I could also do sudo swapon -a in a terminal, but that does not work). The problem is that I have to swapon after every reboot. How can I switch it back on so it stays on even after a reboot?

my fstab:

# # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> 
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation 
UUID=47641b93-9d12-4e6a-b803-dde28f0e5725 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
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  • Can you post your /etc/fstab?
    – user91091
    Oct 12, 2012 at 10:58
  • # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=47641b93-9d12-4e6a-b803-dde28f0e5725 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
    – geoffrey
    Oct 12, 2012 at 13:37
  • You realise the two UUIDs you posted above are actually different? There's a "-8" missing after the "4aa8" block in the swapon response (and I suppose in fstab as well).
    – user148539
    Apr 11, 2013 at 13:02

2 Answers 2

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You have no configuration for swap in /etc/fstab. Add following line to that file:

UUID=<uuid> none   swap    sw    0       0

You have to replace <uuid> with the uuid of your swap partition. To do that, run sudo blkid

$ sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="88A0D0A1A0D09752" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="0620D9F920D9EFA3" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda5: UUID="c282b418-2045-4852-8789-88a44360a0bb" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda6: UUID="f99c6a0c-790a-45ca-a1a9-8874f5a2999b" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda7: UUID="4cc2e909-ebd1-4c72-abee-aa32035bf330" TYPE="swap"

This is a list of my partitions, and as you see, /dev/sda7 is my swap partition. So you can copy the value of UUID corresponding to your swap, omitting the quotes, and use it for your fstab file.

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  • And what if among the rows returned by sudo blkid there isn't one with 'TYPE="swap"'?
    – reallynice
    Sep 15, 2014 at 14:26
  • @niconic you'll need to create swap partition
    – Len
    May 26, 2015 at 12:07
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After the upgrade to 12.04, certain little anomalies occurred. I was unaware my swap partition wasn't working until I tried to open a large file in Gimp.

blkid shows:

/dev/sdb6: UUID="3e0550cf-4a55-4aa8-80fa-24103c1b25a7" TYPE="swap"

but it is not active according to System Monitor. The UUID was definitely right but no go ... not sure how I got to this command:

blkid -p /dev/mapper/foo-swap_1
error: /dev/mapper/foo-swap_1: No such file or directory

File manager showed me a 0 byte icon, filename control, -- so what was supposed to be written there? By what?

sudo swapon --all --verbose yielded
swapon: cannot find the device for UUID=3e0550cf-4a55-4aa80fa-24103c1b25a7

I edited the /etc/fstab file adding

/dev/sdb6   none    swap    sw  0   0

Reboot and System Monitor shows it active.

This was the first site I found for help; in my case, the UUID did not work even though it was in fstab, so there is something missing 'in the middle'. This may help someone, who knows.

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