Ok it worked. "fdisk - l" told me that "/dev/hda7" was linux swap type 82 (I already knew that). "swapon /dev/hda7" didn't because the device was busy. So I logged out and in again as a a failsafe x-windows terminal - and voila "mkswap /dev/hda7" works.Duncan, that says the partition hda6 is not defined.
try "fdisk -l /dev/hda" and see what partitons are defined.
If one of those is listed as type 82 linux swap, then that would be the
name you would use in the mkswap and swapon commands.
if no partitions are defined as type 82 swap then you cannot make swap
available until you have a suitable partition to do so.
Is this really mostly because I restarted my system so that the new fstab refering to the correct hda7 not hda6 was loaded? That's my current guess.
Thanks all for the help, Duncan
