From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: I tried to make a swap device of my old hd, but mkswap wouldn't let me. Commenting out the else clause of the following code in mkswap.c let's me create the swap device just as I want. /* Want a block device. Probably not /dev/hda or /dev/hdb. */ if (!S_ISBLK(statbuf.st_mode)) check=0; /* else if (statbuf.st_rdev == 0x0300 || statbuf.st_rdev == 0x0340) die(_("Will not try to make swapdevice on %s")); */ The commment in the code states the behaviour was intentional, however it is implemented too restrictive. If will be good to have the check as a safety precaution, but maybe the -f (force) switch could be used to force the command anyway. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): util-linux-2.11y-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. type mkswap /dev/hd<x>, where x is an installed hd without any useful data 2. 3. Actual Results: [root@tjvries disk-utils]# mkswap /dev/hdb mkswap: Will not try to make swapdevice on '%s' Note: even the error message is wrong... Expected Results: [root@tjvries disk-utils]# ./mkswap /dev/hdb Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1624666 kB This is the behaviour with my privately build and fixed mkswap binary Additional info:
The solution is to make an hdb1 swap partition that includes the whole disk space. It may waste a few K of space, but it will keep the kernel and disk utils a lot happier. Hopefully losing a little space out of 1.5G won't hurt too much :)