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I'm having a few issues with 12.04 right now when manipulating large image files, which never used to occur when doing the same with 10.04. I noticed when I clean-installed that the swap partition it chose for itself was 3GB instead of the 6GB it was when I had 10.04 installed.

So if for no other reason than to see if it works I'm going to take it back up to 6GB, as seems to be recommended given I have 3GB RAM.

I've already read the Swap-FAQ, but it doesn't address the particular area I'm interested in given my system is already up and running.

My plan is to I boot off the installation CD and run GParted to resize the partitions. Currently ~400GB is data in one primary partition, and Ubuntu is installed on an extended ~100GB partition where ~97GB is for the system and ~3GB is the Swap (give or take a few GB for unallocated space).

If I do that, will my installation remain intact or will it break anything? Comparing with Windows for example, I know resizing the system partition causes problems!

devav2
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Mark Whitehead
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  • Additional: please ignore the symptoms I make reference to for now re: large image files- I want to focus on the swap partition. There are other things I'm doing at the same time to try to address the symptoms, but so if they don't work I'll be posting a related question! Cheers. – Mark Whitehead May 20 '12 at 12:43
  • I've been resizing partitions and playing with them quite a bit. The only time I had problem is when Gparted crashed in between the resizing operation which led to lose my data. After resizing, run "update-grub" and try rebooting. Good luck! – harisibrahimkv May 20 '12 at 12:43
  • See this answer and this answer on creating a swap on a file in case we don't want to repartition. – Takkat May 20 '12 at 15:05

1 Answers1

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Using GParted from the live CD on the swap partition nothing should break. The swap partition should not contain data of value, but you're probably resizing your Ubuntu partition too and therefore the usual warning: do backups. Doing backups of my installations without the home directory (Í have a separate partition for home) results in archives less than 3 GB, so space for backups should really not be an issue.

I would suggest you do the necessary actions in GParted step by step.

If you somehow need to create a new swap partition you should replace the old UUID with the new one in the following files:

/etc/fstab
/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

The latter one is for hibernation. Back in your system execute update-initramfs -u -k all that will update all initial ramdisks to use the new UUID of swap for hibernation. Reboot and you are done.

LiveWireBT
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  • Being paranoid from such problems in the past, all data is backed up on 3 separate drives (including 1 NAS) and in the 2 internal HDs data is held on different partitions to OSs (Windows on 1 HD, Ubuntu on the other). So adjusting the divide between the Ubuntu partition and swap partition shouldn't affect any data as it should only affect the internals of the Extended partition. – Mark Whitehead May 20 '12 at 13:32
  • Thanks LiveWireBT- new partition not required but I'll bear your tip in mind if I ever need to do that.

    Other than that- resizing performed and no errors, despite the (generic) alerts generated while it did it! Thanks all.

     – Mark Whitehead May 20 '12 at 23:58