Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

Ok guys, it’s been about a month since my last post but I have plenty to talk about. Hopefully I’ll get all the content up before the end of the week.

Today I had to deal a Ubuntu issue. Ubuntu failed to recognize my swap after I erased my Windows Server 2003 partition and resized my primary Ubuntu partition. I didn’t realize this until I recently viewed my CPU History in the System Monitor. I glanced down and realized the the “Swap” area listed 0 bytes of 0 bytes used. Very strange. Anyways, I googled it and found this article in the Ubuntu Forums. The problem resided in the fstab file. The fstab file is Ubuntu’s own record of your various hard drives and configurations. Basically, I went into the terminal and typed blkid which listed the true UUIDs of my various partitions. Then I backed-up the file called “fstab”, then opened it and changed the UUID of what Ubuntu had listed as its Swap partition. These are the commands:

cd /etc
This will take you into the etc directory.

sudo cp fstab fstab.backup
This will create a backup file of your fstab in case you need to replace it.

sudo gedit fstab
This opens fstab in a text editor and allows you to literally replace the incorrect UUID of what fstab has listed with the true UUID of your correct Swap partition. Use blkid to list the UUIDs. Copy and paste and your done. That was easy!