Archive for April 15th, 2008

“unable to find swap space signature”

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

My darling wife told me when I got home from work today that the laptop, running Ubuntu, was a bit slow.

On a hunch, I ran free -m and saw that the swap file wasn’t being used. I rebooted it, and sure enough saw the phrase “unable to find swap space signature”. This generally means that the swap file needs to be regenerated (this can happen with some laptops if they unexpectedly drop into hibernate mode), so I rebooted into Recovery Mode and:

  • I checked the output of fdisk -l to ascertain which partition the swap space was on (/dev/hda3)
  • Recreated the swap space with ‘mkswap /dev/hda3‘ and activated it with ‘swapon /dev/hda3
  • I then opened the file /etc/fstab and edited the line referring to the swap space so it would be referred by /dev/hda3 rather than the UUID value.
  • rebooted and kept my fingers crossed.

Everything worked just fine.