I realized what went wrong with the earlier commands. If I do fdisk, it looks like this: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 3644 29270398+ 83 Linux /dev/hdb2 3645 3737 747022+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hdb5 3645 3737 746991 82 Linux swap I don't understand why it still says W95 Ext there, as I thought I deleted that. But anyway, it seems my swap is on hdb5, not hdb2. If I run the following commands: mkswap /dev/hdb5 swapon /dev/hdb5 And add this to your /etc/fstab: /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 then it works. I hope it's okay to run it this way. Dave