Activating swapfile swap [fail] after 9.04 upgrade

[fdudoit]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

I'm using version 8.10 with Wubi.
It seems Swap partition has failed after 9.04 upgrade.
I have seen upgrade error on "memtest86+" module.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: firefox-3.0 3.0.10+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox-3.0
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686

[Kurt Wall (kwall)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to improve Ubuntu. Did memtest86++ detect an error in your system memory? If so, this is not an error or bug that Ubuntu can fix.

[Kurt Wall (kwall)]

Marking incomplete pending additional information.

[Frank Bergmann (frankbg)]

This has nothing to do with memtest or firefox.

It happend to me after an dist-upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 with wubi:

Jaunty hangs with the message "Activating swapfile". You can bypass this by pressing ctrl-alt-del. After that the system boots normally.

Update of Memtest86+ doesn't work because all wubi disk image file live on a fat32 partition where dpkg can't create an symlink to memtest - maybe that's the clue to the swapfile bug, too.

I already tried to create a new swapfile image and put that into fstab, but no success.

Frank

[alexdd (alexdd)]

same with me (Xubuntu): had 8.10 with Wubi, update to 9.04
--memtest86+ update doesnt work
--startup hangs at Activating swapfile swap (resumes normal boot with ctrl+alt+del)

what can I do?

(Linux ubuntu 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux)

[Frank Bergmann (frankbg)]

A simple but ugly fix is to have a look at /etc/fstab.
Comment out the swapfile line so that you have something like
#/host/ubuntu/disks/swap.disk none swap loop,sw 0 0
instead of
/host/ubuntu/disks/swap.disk none swap loop,sw 0 0

This fix is ugly because it actually deactivates swap.
Direct consequence: Hibernate won't work any longer.

Frank

@alexdd: Can you please post the filesystem type where the wubi files live? Is it fat(32) or ntfs?

[alexdd (alexdd)]

@Frank Bergmann: it's fat32.

Still looking for a fix....

[alexdd (alexdd)]

why is this bug marked "incomplete" ?

[Anyeos (lagunaloire)]

Hey, I'm experiencing the same problem but not just near an 8.10 to 9.04 update because I already have updated to 9.04 some months ago without problems. But recently installed some upgrade and the problem appeared.
That is so strange because swapon -a -e -v does not output anything.
But it can be related to glibc or something like that because that is just was I recently updated.
And curiously I get swap on but never is used. That is strange too because swap must be used at least some megabytes but there I get: 0 bytes used:

             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1996864 1071728 925136 0 123588 373120
-/+ buffers/cache: 575020 1421844
Swap: 4200988 0 4200988

I cannot remember exactly what I was upgraded! sorry.

bye

[Anyeos (lagunaloire)]

Lol!
How many and how much biggers files have you in /tmp?
That maybe the cause! That just was my cause.
When the init script mountfilesystems finish the execution next continue with cleanfilesystems and that just clean /tmp too.
If you see the screen you only will see:
Activating swapfile...

But nothing more! that is because when the system is cleaning files in /tmp does not show anything in screen but you can see your hard disk working! That is what I noticed and get my attention.

The solution for me just was: Waiting a lot to let the system clean /tmp.
Next boot will be fast! because now /tmp is clean, lol.

So if you let the system turned on a lot of time and just download a lot of things or just do some big upgrade (I guess that is the cause) where a lot of files are copied to /tmp then the next boot the system will stay a lot of time deleting that. You just must wait it to finish. That is all :P

Bye.

[Frank Bergmann (frankbg)]

Aneyos,

mem shows 0k total, that is the difference. /tmp is almost empty, too.
Perhaps I should move the ubuntu-disk files to a ntfs Partition. Not sure, if this is going to work, so I've to google first.

[Frank Bergmann (frankbg)]

Howto get around:

1. Boot ubuntu from cd/dvd
2. Move the ubuntu-folder from fat to ntfs partition
3. Edit menu.lst so it points to the right uuid
4. Reboot

I got my swapfile back!

Frank

[japlin (jmaplin)]

I'm getting hangs while manually using swapon on ANY swap file on a fat32 partition. swapfiles on ext2/3 work fine.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]