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Alex Poulos
Asked: 2012-01-27 19:07:32 +0800 CST

Was I supposed to have something in this partition?

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EDIT $3 Looks like it already saved my swap even without editing fstab. take a look:

Same Swap

EDIT #2: Alright - rebooted and this is what I got, let me know if I did everything correctly:

Swap-edit 2

EDIT #1: Alright, recreated swap, let me know if I did it right, also, I right clicked and hit "swapon" as well - here's what I got:

new-swap

partitions

I'm not sure what all filesystems my Harddrive was supposed to have after Linux build them, but something I did the other day, until recently, the Unallocated partition you see before you said "Unknown" and had a red circle by it. It had just appeared there after I did something on accident with another program trying to format my other partition

partitioning

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    That was likely either a Manufacturer's Recovery Partition (unlikely since you installed Linux over it and because it is in an extended partition)

    More likely it was being used as swap space, as that is traditionally stored as the last partition on a disk, and is often in an extended partition.

    To turn it back into swap, first right click on the unallocated space and select "New" then change the "File System:" box to "linux-swap". Leave everything else alone. Apply the change, the right click it and select 'swapon'

    Edit: The 'swapon' is only until you shutdown, to make it permanent you need to edit /etc/fstab to include the uuid (long character string) from the output of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep /dev/sda5. You can do this with nano /etc/fstab (works just like a regular editor, press CTRL+X to save and quit.

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  2. If GParted is saying that space is unallocated, then there is no partition covering that portion of the hard drive. If it said "unknown" previously, then you most likely deleted a partition.

    As for what might have been there, one possibility is that it was your swap partition. One way to check this is to look for a reference in /etc/fstab (e.g. a comment like "swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation").

    If this is the case, then you haven't lost any important data, but I would suggest recreating the swap partition since it lets you better utilise the resources on your computer. Once you've recreated the partition, reformat it with mkswap using the UUID found in the corresponding line of the /etc/fstab file:

    mkswap -U $uuid $device
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