Adding a swap partition without formating anything on a disk

[orlox]

Hi. I have a mint installation done on a computer in which at the moment of the install, a swap partition could not be assigned or created. I was wondering if it is possible to create one without having to format any of the partitions present on the system.

[lauren]

Hi oriox!
In Windows you have a file, in Linux a partition, so you have to create a partition for swap.
1. What about your RAM? Please post the output of

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free

2. We must see your partitions, please first post the output of - as root

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parted -l print

lowercase "L"

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fdisk -l

and see if - as root - again

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gparted

shows your partitions (you could attach a screenshot).

[orlox]

Right now im not at my home so I cant give you the output of those commands directly, but I remember most of that info.
The ram in the computer is 1gb, but appears listed as ~870MB (I think this is related to the difference between bit and byte), so I think a swap partition could come in hand eventually.

The HDD has two partitions, sda1 which has windows installed, and sdb5 which has mint 10. Each of them has a size of order ~80GB, but the windows partition doesn't have a lot of free space, so the ideal thing to do would be to take a bit of space from the mint partition to create swap space.

[lauren]

Hi!
Sorry, I'm offline for a few days, but in any case you should post the outputs.
BTW: It's not bit/ byte, maybe it's MiB / MB (factor 1.024; I don't know the exact English expression, maybe: 2 to raise to the power of 10 = 1024).

Seeley has written some HOWTOs, in one of them he is writing about swap: viewtopic.php?f=141&t=63013/url
and his help is useful: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=63673&p=366328#p366328/url

[proxima_centauri]

Orlox,

I would recommend the following method, for creating a SWAP file on the local disk - instead of making it's own partition -> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110117#qa

[orlox]

Orlox,

I would recommend the following method, for creating a SWAP file on the local disk - instead of making it's own partition -> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110117#qa

Right on! added my swap file with no problems.

Thanks