SOLVED Re: problem cleaning up old drive

[nepal]

Following Hakan's instructions below worked exactly as he 
said and solved the swap problem. In my case I actually 
wasn't using any swapfile space as that configuration had 
somehow got messed up. The old partitions on hd0 have been 
removed, the computer rebooted and all works well.

nepal.

On Friday 21 Nov 2008, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
> 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