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I am planning to upgrade memory from 128 to 384 MB. When I installed archlinux I chosed autoconfigure, so now can someone explain me step by step how to resize my swap partition. For live Cds I have Knoppix 3.6 and Pro Mepis beta 2 and which tool is best for the job.
My partition table looks like the following
Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20020396032 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 66 33263+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 67 587 262584 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3 588 38792 19255320 83 Linux
Thanks Cheikh
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I use 'parted'. It is in the repos. If you use reiserfs you might need to install 'libreiserfs'.
The reason I like parted is that it defines everything in no. of MBs from the beginning of the disk. This way you just calculate how big you want the partitions and not bother about blocks and whatever else filesystems use (personally, I don't know anything about them).
I don't know which liveCD will have partitioning software, though, I've just used parted since ever. I saw a thread the other day about a gui tool for partitioning (can't find the thread right now).
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just using cfdisk and the appropriate filesystem resize tools should be enough. In case of swap just do mkswap, others may need resizing with things like resize2fs, resize_reiserfs, etc.
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Since i am used to partition magic I have used QTparted, which is a gui for parted..or cfdisk/fdisk
http://www.linuxportalen.com -> Linux Help portal for Linux and ArchLinux (in swedish)
Dell Inspiron 8500
Kernel 2.6.14-archck1 (selfcompiled)
Enlightenment 17
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Yes, and last I knew, qtparted was on the arch livecd.
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One warning about QtParted:
I once managed to screw up my Reiserfs partition completely trying to do a Move/Resize. I think resizing should not be a problem, but you have make sure the start position of the partition does not change.
YMMV, of course.
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Ok things happen I have Knoppix 3.6 it comes with qtparted also arch has qtparted I think that resizing my swap to a bigger size will put me in a position where i will have to resize everything else. OK but one thing I noticed after trying qtparted with Knoppix 3.6 I notice now that my file system is read only now, and it did not resize anything and now when booting i get so many warning messages and X wont start anymore. One of the first error is mount cant find /etc/fstab /in/ /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
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I think that resizing my swap to a bigger size will put me in a position where i will have to resize everything else.
You added more ram, so I thought you wanted less swap, why the hell would you want to make the swap partition bigger? (Do not think that swap should be twice as big as your ram, that isn't true for years.)
As for your problems: I don't trust parted, don't know what you or it did, so no idea what's wrong or how to fix it.
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(Do not think that swap should be twice as big as your ram, that isn't true for years.)
Thats how I've always understood it. I spent alot time googling for the correct swap size before installing arch and that was the common answer that always showed up (unless ram is larger than 1GB).
How big should it be?
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Depends on how much ram you have and what you do. I have 256 Mb ram and 141 Mb swap, but it is almost never used, so could as wel have 32 Mb. If too much swap is used then the machine will be unbearable slow anyway, so can as well just let the OOM killer kill the bloatware.
With the 2.6 kernel swapfiles should be as fast as seperate swap partitions, so nowaday I wouldn't make one at all, but just use a swapfile:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/swap bs=1M count=128
$ mkswap /mnt/swap
$ su
# echo "/mnt/swap swap swap defaults" >> /etc/fstab
# swapon -a
Then later if it turns out that it's not enough you simply make the file bigger, or add another one.
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Now I know that swap is not supposed to be twice the size of ram. Is it possible to use swap and swap file?
Cheikh
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Yes, you can use both a swap partition and a swapfile at the same time.
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