Swap Space Not Activated On Boot

[Graham Watkins]

Hello all,

The eternal newbie here again.

I've recently become aware that the 4Gb swap partition I created during 
the installation process is not being started on boot. Initially at 
least, this was due to my own stupidity because I somehow forgot to 
format it.  I have since formatted it using gnome-disks but it is still 
not available on boot although I can start it manually in gnome-disks.

Most of the time,it's not really a problem but when I start my VMware 
Windows 7 installation I get an error message complaining about the 
absence of swap space and my system slows down to a crawl

I think I probably need to change something in fstab but so far all my 
tinkering has been in vain.

fdisk -l and cat /etc/fstab is shown below:

sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1956fe8b

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63   625141759   312570848+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00021c33

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *        2048   117270527    58634240   83  Linux
/dev/sdb2       117272574   312580095    97653761    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5       117272576   125270015     3998720   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb6       125272064   312580095    93654016   83  Linux

sudo cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=ac228376-2087-45ee-a47e-6018398186e2 /               ext4 
errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /home was on /dev/sdb6 during installation
UUID=fba7b900-46aa-402d-88a2-359f05945a2f /home           ext4 defaults 
        0       2
# swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=83ffea71-702b-4570-9c9a-3680f3290c56 none            swap    sw 
        0       0
#/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Graham