Hibernation woes

[Ted Hilts]

John Hubbard wrote:
> Ted Hilts wrote:
>> So either the swap PARTITION itself needs to be enlarged -- if that 
>> is safely possible (and there is no example in the article suggesting 
>> this) or a swap PARTITION needs to be created from (free) disk space 
>> which I take to mean unformatted free physical unused disk space just 
>> laying around for no reason at all. Most of the article deals with 
>> swap "file" creation and change.
> As always back up data before playing with disks but you can boot to a 
> live cd and run gparted to change drive size. I was able to double the 
> size of my swap partition by taking space from the partitions before 
> (/) and after (/home) it with no problems. I am sure that there is a 
> way to do it with out the live cd but it will be a lot easier to do it 
> with one.
> I haven't read the article in question but the basic steps are:
> 0) BACK UP IMPORTANT DATA!!!!!
> 1) boot to ubuntu/kubuntu/xubuntu desktop live cd (not alternate cd)
> 2) make sure that gparted is installed from a console run 'sudo 
> apt-get install gparted'
> 3) from the console run gparted
> 4) use the gui to resize and move partitions around.
> 5) reboot (remove the live cd when prompted to)
>
>
John

Unfortunately this is a dual boot machine (XP and Ubuntu) and will 
probably soon be a triple boot machine. As of right now the disk as XP 
sees it is the C drive and a small partion. The same disk as Ubuntu sees 
it is SDA3 with SDA2 and SDA1the partions for XP and the XP restore. 
SDA3 (Ubuntu) is an 80 GB partion -- not exactly as there is also a swap 
partion which is apparently NOT large enough to support the hibernate 
function which requires a partition only a swap PARTITION. So Ubuntu and 
this swap together make up the two partitions in this 80 GByte chunk. 
When I was installing the Ubuntu partion in this 80 GByte chunk I also 
installed the swap partition -- which turned out to be the right thing 
to do but I did not make it big enough for the hibernation function. 
Oddly enough (since that is the problem and I agree it is the problem) 
it did initially work and this made things very confusing.

So, I only have the two partions one of which is the actual Ubuntu 
installation as "/" and the other is the swap partion. There are not 
other partions to monkey with as you were able to do. If I reduce "/" I 
might hack off part of the OS or data hanging as fragments. We are 
talking here of a very much enlarged swap partion in the order of 
several gigs where right now it is about 80% of 1 gig. I have never done 
a defrag on a Linux machine. Maybe a defrag would clear some disk space 
adjacent to the present swap partion -- I simply don't know. Maybe the 
partition function or cfdisk takes care of that. I am certainly willing 
to give it a try if someone knows for sure that I won't knock Ubuntu 
into oblivion.

I agree with the use of a live disk with the necessary tools on board to 
do the operations with Ubuntu shut down. But whether or not the swap 
partition can safely be enlarged is still just conjecture.

Thanks -- Ted