Hey all! I'm reinstalling my hard drive today and would like to learn how to make a SWAP partition. Can someone direct me to or give me a good step-to-step instructions for creating one? I tried googling it, but I'm not very familiar with some of the things they were talking about, so if someone could just walk me through the steps or direct me to a site that could show a novice like me how to do it, I'd be really grateful. Thanks!

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For Windows systems you generally just partition a small part of the HD. Then after Windows is installed you format it (if it isn't already) and then move the swap file over to it. Are you asking how to partition it in the first place?

There's a lot of debate about whether a separate swap partition is really beneficial in any way, especially with newer OS's. On Linux boxes I always have one, but I rarely bother on Windows boxes anymore.

If you're going to bother making a swap partition for windows, it's only worth doing in terms of performance if you put that partition on its own hard drive on the second/master IDE channel.

Otherwise leave it on the first/master IDE channel on the same drive (though not necessarily partition) as the OS making sure there's lots (3x, preferably) of free room for both the OS and the swap file to expand. Windows tends to fluxuate in size very dramatically. There's no real advantage of putting the swap file on its own partition, except possibly a slight reduction in fragmentation.

Linux, on the other hand, is much better behaved in terms of swap space behavior, so you can give it its own partition. Again, making sure it's on either of the master IDE channels, preferably opposite the channel being most heavily used when the swap space gets stressed. (The linux OS isn't so busy that you need to separate it from the swap space.)

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I should say that if your OS is installed and you don't already have a partition made for it, don't bother. It's not worth the effort and there's a good chance you'll end up losing data.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Was there any particular reason you wanted a swap partition? I'd agree with Moose not to bother.

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I went ahead and installed it without the swap partition. One of my friends seemed to think that it was vitally important to have one, and since he taught me just about everything I know about computers I figured I should do what he says. But I've tried it without a swap partition before and it seemed to work okay, so I guess it's no big deal after all.

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One nuclear bomb could wreck your whole day.

LOL was he having you create a Virus Vault?

In the old days, pre Win2K, when memory and hard disk size were low, and hard disk were slower than they are not, one trick was to create a dedicated partition for NT's swap file. For speed, you formatted it as FAT16, using NT's maximum 64K cluster size. (DOS and Win9x only supported up to
32K clusters). You then put your single swap file (called "pagefile.sys") on that partition. FAT16 was faster than NTFS, and the large cluster sizes increased the speed as well.

But now, the speed increase from that isn't worth the trouble. Me, I do have a dedicated swap partition of sorts -- it's a "caches" drive where I keep the 1.5GB pagefile, plus other cache files from other software, and is NTFS. Nothing is gained from that really, other than having it all in one place and out of the way of other stuff.

-Richard

Ok, that makes a little more sense to me now. I wasn't even sure how a SWAP partition worked. I'm glad that making one isn't worth the trouble these days.

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One nuclear bomb could wreck your whole day.