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“unable to find swap space signature”

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.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under General, linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to ““unable to find swap space signature””

  1. Michael Mann says:
    Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    This post saved me. Ran into this problem on my desktop for some reason and this worked great. It was not cryptic as some others directions. Much appreciated.