Ubuntu – the safest way to remove a swap partition

12.04gpartedpartitioningswap

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a 64-bit HP laptop with a 16 GB flash drive. I do not have a working hard drive right now. When I installed Ubuntu, I created a 2 GB swap partition on sdb1. I have since learned that swap partitions are generally a bad idea on flash drives, so I would like to use my swap space for my other partitions. You can see my partition scheme in the link below.

GParted Screen

I have read that I just have to comment sdb1 out of the fstab file, boot from a GParted live CD, select swapoff for sdb1, delete/merge with other partition, and everything's good.

But, I've also read that messing with sdb1 can change the UUID of sdb2 or sdb3 and cause problems. Is this true? Does initramfs use swap at all?

Also, when I get Ubuntu running on my laptop with an internal hard drive, does the swap partition help that much? I have 6 GB of DDR3. Does the rule of 1.5xActual RAM still apply? It seems like quite a bit to me.

Thanks for the help!

UPDATE:
I have removed swap. The process I followed is:

  1. Right click swap partition in GParted and selected swapoff.
  2. Used # to comment the swap partition out of fstab.
  3. I tried to boot from a live GParted CD, but I kept getting an error, so I ran GParted in Ubuntu.
  4. Deleted swap partition in GParted.
  5. Unmounted /windows.
  6. Expanded /windows to take the remaining space.
  7. Mounted /windows.

The / and /windows partitions each kept their own names and UUIDs, and everything is running fine.
I have never seen any swap space being used before, and I don't intend to use the hibernate function, so I think removing swap was a good idea.

Best Answer

Try to monitor your swap memory usage in a terminal with top or htop, which is more user friendly. If you don't have htop installed, you can install it with:

sudo apt-get install htop

With your amount of RAM, I would say that your swap usage is 0% a lot of time.

If you want to format your swap partition, first you have to disable the swap with the swapoff command. Then format the partition with mkfs.ext4 or mkfs. After that you need to edit your /etc/fstab so that the system will mount your new partition at the boot time.

You can also use a graphical application like Disks, which ships with Ubuntu.

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