WARNING: I have never done this! You should check the man page for mkswap, swapon, swapoff, fdisk and fstab. It looks like you will have to turn swapoff. Edit the fstab if you want to use a different swap partition. Mkswap the new partition or on your old partition. Then turn the swapon. Please shutdown all programs possible if for no other reason to fit everything in memory without swap. Do not be surprised if something goes wrong so backup first! On Sunday 27 April 2003 09:58 am, Federico Damonte wrote:

Dear list,

thanks to a pointer by Jerry Feldman (thanks!) I found out that what made my hard diic grate during boot was indeed the swap partition. To solve the problem, i tried refomatting the sawp partition, but could not find any way to do that (I have SuSE 8.0), neither in Yast nor with command line tools.

I tried deleting the swap and recreating it as a reiserfs partition, in yast, iand always got an "fdisk failed" error. After several tries, i decided to "continue" instead of "reboot", and i had an extra reiserfs partition and no grinding. When i deleted that partition and put the swap back in, though (again after several fdisk failures), i got the same grinding back.

What i was going to do now, is to delete swap once and for all and never touch my partition table again, but i would like to be sure nothing else is going wrong wth my hard disk.

So i would like to know:

1. is there something like "scandisk" under linux (sorry for the "MSism"!) that checks the *surface* of the partition?

2. how can i reformat the swap filesystem (if there is such a thing)?

thanks again to all in advance!

federico

The 03.04.27 at 16:58, Federico Damonte wrote:

1. is there something like "scandisk" under linux (sorry for the "MSism"!) that checks the *surface* of the partition?

badblocks - search a device for bad blocks Also, assuming your disk is reasonably recent (few years) it will be SMART capable (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology), and your bios may have support for it. Then try the utility: ide-smart - IDE SMART Checking tool If you suspect a problem, then the best is probably to use utilities from the manufacturer; for example, for Seagate you can download a file to create a boot floppy (dos) with test utilities. The exact meaning of the SMART codes or values depends on the manufacturer. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson