Hibernation woes

[Derek Broughton]

Pastor JW wrote:

> swapon: cannot
> canonicalize /dev/disk/by-uuid/52810d5c-61ab-4942-afa2-9e6e953f83
> 9d: No such file or directory
> swapon: cannot stat
> /dev/disk/by-uuid/52810d5c-61ab-4942-afa2-9e6e953f839d: No such file or
> directory

OK.  That simplifies things.  What's probably happened is that you _have_ a
swap partition, but "mkswap" has been run on it since /etc/fstab was
created.  Every time mkswap is run, like mkfs on a filesystem, the
partition gets a new UUID and it breaks fstab, which controls the mount
points.  Now, putting the UUIDs in the fstab was a really good idea when
the kernel developers were changing the /dev/ names we usually use for
mounting, but it causes headaches now. 
> 
> I am not all that comfortable with this system yet and don't know how one
> would go about creating a swap partition on this Operating System. 

First, look in /etc/fstab and you should see a line that says:
UUID=59722752810d5c-61ab-4942-afa2-9e6e953f839d none swap sw 0 0
(at least approximately).  With luck, the previous line is a comment showing
what the real device name is (these got placed there in an earlier upgrade
process).

So then, you'd want to check that nothing else was actually mounting a file
system on that partition.

Do something like this (I'm not certain sfdisk is present by default, and of
course you need to use the correct name for your drive):

$ sudo sfdisk /dev/sda -l

Disk /dev/sda: 14593 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *      0+   2674    2675-  21486906   83  Linux
/dev/sda2      13542   14592    1051    8442157+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda4       2675   13541   10867   87289177+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5      13168+  13541     374-   3004123+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6       2675+   2917     243-   1951834+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7       2918+  13167   10250-  82333093+  8e  Linux LVM

If you see something saying "Linux swap / Solaris", that's your swap
partition, if it matches the one in /etc/fstab, even better!  In either
case, you can replace the UUID=59722752810d5c-61ab-4942-afa2-9e6e953f839d
part of the line in /etc/fstab with the /dev/ name, save fstab, then "sudo
swapon -a" should give you a swap partition.

> Besides,
> I have not found a backup system for this machine yet.  Wouldn't creating
> a swap mean I'd have to cut it out of an existing partition?  I'd suspect
> then the existing data is in danger of being damaged.  This was a factory
> install of 7.10 from directly from Dell and it has no foreign Operating
> Systems on
> it.  It was upgraded to 8.04 on-line using update manager.

I'd be hugely surprised if it didn't have a swap partition when they created
it.  If it doesn't, you should complain.  Hopefully, as a pastor, you have
better complaint skills than I do, because I gave up on them when they
flatly refused to honor my warranty.
-- 
derek