Problems with repartitioning a HP Pavilion Laptop

[Liam Proven]

On 18 August 2012 02:13, Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 2012/08/18 00:55 (GMT+0100) Liam Proven composed:
>
>
>> Now, on a modern PC with lots of RAM that barely touches swap at all,
>> and superfast bus-mastering DMA hard disks, there really is no point
>> at all in worrying about it.
>
> There still may be with multiboot, but for reasons unrelated to speed. Linux
> installers all seem to think they have an unconditional right to format the
> swap partition. As soon as the second Linux installer formats swap, the
> volume label if present and the UUID are changed, causing first boot of the
> elder Linux to choke on init due to any of different device ID, UUID or
> label for mounting swap. At least when put near the front the device ID is
> unlikely to change when partitioning is extended to accommodate additional
> Linux installation(s).

I routinely multiboot most of my machines - the one I'm typing on has
DOS, XP, Win7, 11.10 and 12.04. (And a copy of PC-BSD.)

I've never once had a problem with multiple distros sharing a single
swap partition, & I've been installing multiple Linuxes onto single
machines since about 1997.

If one has hibernated and you boot a different one, that might cause a
problem, but if so, the saved state is discarded and the next time it
boots up from scratch, I believe.

> It may be prudent to revisit with modern hardware speeds and software sizes.
> CPU and RAM speeds have advanced considerably more than disk I/O speed in
> the past 17 years, while software bloat is infamous.

Point taken, but with lots of RAM, swap is fading in importance. I
actually run some installs without any swap at all and it works fine.
You can use zRam for a bit of breathing space if needed, but with
512MB-1GB of RAM, I find you don't really need any swap space at all
in typical usage.

-- 
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