UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I am having some problems understanding the info from the following output:

Disk /dev/sda: 17849 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+ 499 500- 4016218+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 500 999 500 4016250 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 1000 17848 16849 135339592+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty


I wan to know how large each partition is. I selected the size for /dev/sda2 in fdisk to be 1000M but if I am understanding the info correctly I only have 0.5megs for /dev/sda2. Can someone tell me how to effectively create partition sizes in fdisk? it seems when I try and specify the size using the actual size it does not work well.

One other question:
/dev/shm 517172 0 517172 0% /dev/shm

Is /dev/shm the swap partition /dev/sda2?

Thanks!

I make /dev/sda2 to be 3.8 Gb.

i.e. 4016250 blocks of 1024 bytes per block.

(4016250 * 1024) / 1024 / 1024 /1024 Gigabytes

I guess fdisk does not seem to handle creating partition sizes if you try and give it the exact size instead of blocks. Does anyone else have this problem?

For future reference, please use [code][/code] tags for listings, source code, ...

This means that each of the 500 cylinders allocated for /dev/sda2 is 8225280 bytes (or about 8MB) large, which is about 4GB in total. Or, from the next column, it consists of 4016250 blocks á 1024 bytes = ~4GB.

You can specify the intended size by using '+1024M' (=1GB) when fdisk asks for the ending block number.

No, it's a pseudo filesystem (much like /dev, /proc, /sys) used for shared memory usage (IPC/Message passing). Swap partitions don't show up in the output of mount/df. Use swapon -s for that.

I have tried swapon -s as you suggested and I see nothing which is strange since CENTOS at boot reports that it mounts the SWAP partition. My fstab is:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sdb1 /home8 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/shm /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sys /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrom auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
~

WHen I try executing swapon -L SWAP-sda2 I get:
swapon: cannot find the device for SWAP-sda2

What should I do?

It sounds like the label wasn't put into the swap partition when it was formatted, hence centos can't find it on boot. That it says its mounting swap may only mean its at the point where it would, not that it's actually found it. You can reformat the swap partion with mkswap -L label /path/to/device