Switching partitions?

[shatfield1529]

I have my HD drive divided up into five partitions:
-System (5GB),
-Applications (5GB),
-Users (5GB),
-Media (20GB), and
-Developer (2.5GB).
I followed the hint which allows /Users to point to /Volumes/Users, and /Applications to point to /Volumes/Applications.

I want to turn one of the partitions into a swap partition, preferably one of the 5GB partitions. What I have planned to do is, after moving the Developer software to the Applications partition, move the Users data (which is only about 300MB) to the old Developer partition and turn the old Users partition into a swap partition.

In other words, it would now look like this:
-System (5GB),
-Applications (incl. Developers) (5GB),
-Swap (5GB),
-Media (20GB), and
-Users (2.5GB).

How would I do this? It seems that I could just boot into single-user mode, change the name of the Users partition to 'Swap' and change the Developer partition's name to 'Users'. After that, I would change the Swap partition to, well, a swap partition. /Users would still point to /Volumes/Users, but /Volumes/Users would just point to a different partition.

The only problem with this method is that I thought it up, and I'm no expert on doing things like this. Therefore, something would probably go wrong.

Can anyone suggest how to do this the right way instead of the shatfield1529 way?

 

[naodx]

Is there a particular reason why you want to create a swap partition? I've seen some tests that show that it doesn't make any speed difference in 10.2 or 10.3. Yes it did make a difference in 10.0.x, albeit it was a small increase in performance.

If you still want to do this, there are a couple of articles on www.xlr8yourmac.com, and one of bombich's website, the maker of carbon copy cloner, can't remember the site right off the top of my head.

Now these articles are related to making a swap partition on 10.0 and 10.1, but not 10.2 or 10.3, so what they have to say may or may not work for you.

 

[shatfield1529]

Is there a particular reason why you want to create a swap partition? I've seen some tests that show that it doesn't make any speed difference in 10.2 or 10.3. Yes it did make a difference in 10.0.x, albeit it was a small increase in performance.

It's not really for perfomance, per se, it's just annoying to get "Your startup disk is almost out of free space" messages every few minutes when I'm doing something swap intensive.

Now that I think about it, I could avoid the whole relabelling fiasco and just relocate the swap file location to the Users or Media partitions (Media having ~11.5 GB free), keeping everything else where it already is. At least I wouldn't have to mess with the partition map or anything like that.

 

[naodx]

The reason why you are getting that message, is because your main system partition is to small. VM itself can take up to 4 gig if you ever have that much stuff paged out of memory.

You could do what you suggested in your last post, but it is possible that future updates may change the files you need to modify in order to move the swap partition.

Another problem that you could encounter, is if one of your partitions don't mount in the same order as it did when you setup your swap partition, you could end up with a 'ghost' swap partition that isn't easily removed.

If you have some means of backing everything up, your best bet would be to re-partition your drive, making the system partition big enough to hold an additional 4 gig for any swapping.