Bart Dorlandt - BAMweb.nl

Just a couple of days ago I wanted to increase my swap space to 1 GB instead of 512 MB. This way I could finally do an hibernate. Most of the time I wasn't able to because I have 1 GB of RAM and with firefox and thunderbird running it uses a lot.

So what did I do. I installed Gparted to adjust my disks. As you can see further below my swap partition is for my biggest partition. So I had to resize and move my data a bit to the right so I could grew my swap partition. Make sure do this when you have enough time. I took me around 3 hours. The following commands where used. 

apt-get install gparted

Make sure you have unmounted the partition you want to edit, you are also able to do it with Gparted, but it crashed on my machine. So I did it by hand. NOTE: remember the partition you are using.

System > Administration > Partition Editor

Now we are going to create the swap partition.

mkswap /dev/sda5

After this we will use the UUID in the /etc/fstab and in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume. Now we are going to reinitialize the ramfs by using this command:

update-initramfs -u

After this has finished you may reboot normally.

Extra information 

The following commands may help you during the way. 

 # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8f8002b1

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          12       96358+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *          13        1290    10265535    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            1291        2197     7285477+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            2198        7296    40957717+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5            2198        2327     1044193+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6            2328        7296    39913461   83  Linux

# blkid
/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="07D5-081A" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sda2: UUID="66DC7E18DC7DE2AB" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda3: UUID="51853ab8-929e-4c6e-ada7-f8da01e2d18a" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="34c13693-7a5d-4274-a002-623cc82b062d"
/dev/sda6: UUID="1452744c-4c0e-4da5-a30b-39549a44de83" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

# cat /proc/swaps
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda5                               partition       1044184 0       -1 

Error section 

These could be found/seen during booting or in dmesg.

Unable to find swap-space signature

activating swap                       [fail]