I created the SWAP partition in GParted after resizing my Ubuntu partition. All the operations went off smoothly. When I right-clicked the SWAP drive, it showed "SWAPON", so I clicked it & it activated the SWAP. Then I restarted the machine & it showed the SWAP as SWAPON again, so I hit it & it failed to activate it giving this error message:
Then I shut down the machine & restarted. The HDD looks like this now:
Then I tried to format sda15
to linux-swap
& it could not do it giving the error message:
Just to give a bit of context, I asked a question before on how to repartition my Ubuntu hard disk: How can I see where Ubuntu has been installed on my HDD? I repartitioned (and actually reinstalled) Ubuntu, but now I want to create a SWAP partition.
Best Answer
Why not just create a swap file in unused space? Quick and easy:
For Adding a 512MiB swap
We will create a /mnt/512MiB.swap swap file and set the permissions so that users cannot read it directly.
sudo fallocate -l 512m /mnt/512MiB.swap
sudo chmod 600 /mnt/512MiB.swap
fallocate length suffixes are: k, m, g, t, p, e (See man fallocate).
By default your swap file may be created world readable. We set the 600 mode permissions in order to prevent users from being able to read potentially sensitive information from the swap file.
If fallocate fails with "fallocate failed: Operation not supported" as it currently does on my Maverick machine, you can do this the old way, again 512 mebibytes:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/512MiB.swap bs=1024 count=524288
sudo chmod 600 /mnt/512MiB.swap
sudo mkswap /mnt/512MiB.swap
sudo swapon /mnt/512MiB.swap
The additional swap is now available and can be seen by
cat /proc/meminfo
orfree
Edit the /etc/fstab:
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
Add this line at the end of the file:
/mnt/512MiB.swap none swap sw 0 0
Save. After the next reboot the swap will be used automatically.
Example of making a swap file
This is an example of making and using a swap file on a computer with no swap partition. Enter the command below and your password when prompted:
sudo fallocate -l 512m /mnt/512MiB.swap
Then this command:
sudo mkswap /mnt/512MiB.swap
Output will be similar to the below.
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 536866 kB
no label, UUID=dd6a01c8-93f0-41e0-9b7a-306956d8821b
Then issue the command:
sudo swapon /mnt/512MiB.swap
The following command shows you the results:
cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 499496 kB
MemFree: 9156 kB
Buffers: 4748 kB
Cached: 233140 kB
SwapCached: 724 kB
Active: 254432 kB
Inactive: 157920 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 499496 kB
LowFree: 9156 kB
SwapTotal: 524280 kB
SwapFree: 523556 kB
Dirty: 128 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 243420 kB
Slab: 20672 kB
CommitLimit: 774028 kB
Committed_AS: 648680 kB
PageTables: 2224 kB
VmallocTotal: 524280 kB
VmallocUsed: 5708 kB
VmallocChunk: 518176 kB
Make the change permanent by editing your fstab
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
Add the line:
/mnt/512MiB.swap none swap sw 0 0
A simple command to see usage is:
free
Then, after running a few more programs...
free
Next, reboot to make sure it will work consistently.
free
Source: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq