problem cleaning up old drive

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Nepal,

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 4:30 PM, nepal google
<nepal.roade at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I have a 40gb hda drive that I want to completely erase and
> try to re-use following the problems I've had and reported
> to the list.
If you are destroying the disk, use DBAN or similar.

> The snag is that the swap drive is on that drive, not on the
> hdb that I am using presently.

Here's a method:
My dinky server has 2GB RAM and 3GBish Swap.

root at jupiter:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1997928    1953024      44904          0      10476    1371172
-/+ buffers/cache:     571376    1426552
Swap:      3229024        880    3228144


First, create a swapfile (like goode olde Windows):

root at jupiter:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 18.7898 s, 57.1 MB/s

Which will create a 1GB file.

Create a swapfile on this file:
root at jupiter:~# mkswap /swapfile
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1073737 kB
no label, UUID=ff64d8bd-b03a-4a12-a4ea-3e9e0ea19aea

Brilliant. Turn on the swapfile:
root at jupiter:~# swapon /swapfile
root at jupiter:~# swapon -s
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sdb5                               partition       3229024 880     -1
/swapfile                               file            1048568 0       -2

As you can see, now I have two swap areas.
Now turn off the old swap partition

root at jupiter:~# swapoff /dev/sdb5
root at jupiter:~# swapon -s
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/swapfile                               file            1048568 0       -2

root at jupiter:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1997928    1967508      30420          0       8936    1365880
-/+ buffers/cache:     592692    1405236
Swap:      1048568          0    1048568

Make sure that you remove this partition out of the /etc/fstab.

Now you no longer use that swap partition. Now I can delete that disk,
if I wanted

If you have enough RAM, you can use the system w/o a swap space. As
you might have noticed, I am hardly using anything on this server and
there was nothing that was swapped out.

When you have two swap partitions and have swapped out, turning one of
them off is harmless. If necessary the second swapfile will be used.

-- 
Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org