Problem with activating swap partition

**bungle3** · 03-26-2005

Hi

This is my first try at installing gentoo, have read many stories that its quite a challenge first time round, ive lasted 10mins and now im stuck.

Have partitioned the hard drive with the basic boot, swap, root and have have applied the ext3 filesystem to all of them.

Its when i try to activate the swap partition i get an error message.

I type - "swapon /dev/hda2"

And the reply is - "Unable to find swap-space signature"
"swapon: /dev/hda2: Invalid argument"

Any help on this would be great!

**PhilF** · 03-27-2005

I'm still a relative Newbie on this but I have been having problems with my SuSE partition using too much of my disk so I've been reading up on partitions.

It sounds as though you have incorrectly set your Swap as EXT£ rather than Linux Swap.

I think you are meant to give the swap partition a seperate code (82?) that tells the OS that it is swap space rather than storage space.

**smindinvern** · 03-27-2005

^^That's right, when you fdisk your drive, you need to tell it that this is swap space, and you don't need to format it, otherwise it won't work at all

**bungle3** · 03-27-2005

Thanks for the help, that problem is sorted.
Time for the next round!

Carried on throught the instalation with no other problems until i reached the reboot section. The first time around after rebboting it said it was loading grub but nothing happened, i put this down to messing up the process somewhere and started the installation again from scratch.

This time after i reached the reboot stage grub loaded sucessfully, when i select gentoo linux it replies -

Booting 'Gentoo Linux 2.6.11-r'
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-gentoo-r4
Error 19: Linux kernal must be loaded before initrd
Press a key to continue

When i press a key it takes me back to grub, and the process repeats itself. I am not looking forward to starting the installation again if i have to.

Does anyone know a fix to this problem?

Many thanks Martin

**sarumont** · 03-27-2005

Originally Posted by bungle3

When i press a key it takes me back to grub, and the process repeats itself. I am not looking forward to starting the installation again if i have to.

Does anyone know a fix to this problem?

Many thanks Martin

Can you post your grub.conf? It seems that you have the initrd line before the kernel line in the Gentoo entry...

**bungle3** · 03-27-2005

Would do but not sure how to now that my comp only loads into grub.
If you can tell me how get to the file, i will put it up.

Cheers

**genesus** · 03-28-2005

boot into any live cd

and if your root is /dev/hda3 and your boot is /dev/hda1 --change values to reflect your own setup,

Code:

mkdir /mnt/gentoo
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot

mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot

cd /mnt/gentoo/boot

and you will be into your grub directory, open the config file with your favorite editor

**bungle3** · 03-28-2005

Ok sorted, grub.conf contains -

default 0
timeout 20
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/spash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.11-r4
root(hd0,0)
kernal /kernal-2.6.11-gentoo-r4 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc ramdisk=/8192 real_root=/dev/hda3
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-gentoo-r4

**LeFou** · 04-17-2005

It's pronounced "kernel"

i mean, i think you can call the file "kernal" if you want, but the grub comman is "kernel"

**jaboua** · 04-17-2005

Seems like a missing swap-signature... Did you remember to use "mkswap /dev/hda2"?

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