De-activate a swap partition

[Jeff Vian]

On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 19:48 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> I want to reorganise partitions on hdb - combining some, to make fewer, larger 
> partitions.  gparted says that I can't do that, because hdb11 is being used 
> as a swap partition.  I do have a swap on hda, so could easily manage wihout 
> it temporarily.  Is there any way to do that without rebooting?  I removed it 
> from fstab and did 'mount -a', but that doesn't solve the problem.  I think 
> I'm right in saying that it is not mounted, in a conventional sense, so I 
> don't know how to proceed.

The swapoff/swapon commands work and if the partition you want to take
out of service is not actually in use it may be possible to use swapoff
to disable it without a reboot.  

I could not verify that from prior experience though, so I just tested
it on my running system and swapoff seemed to turn off swapping on the
specified device. In my case, no swap was actually in use so I expected
no problem.  I would assume your experience may be dependent upon the
amount of activity in swap.

swapon -s gives a lot of detail about the actual swap usage.