3.6 Initialize and Activate a Swap Partition
This will be the “Next” menu item once you have created one disk partition. You have the choice of initializing and activating a new swap partition, activating a previously-initialized one, or doing without a swap partition.
A swap partition is strongly recommended, but you can do without one if you insist and if your system has more than 4MB RAM. If you wish to do this, select the “Do Without a Swap Partition” item from the menu and move on to the next section.
It’s always permissible to reinitialize a swap partition, so select “Initialize and Activate a Swap Partition” unless you are sure you know what you are doing. This menu choice will first present you with a dialog box reading “Please select the partition to activate as a swap device.” The default device presented should be the swap partition you’ve already set up; if so, just press Enter.
Next you have the option to scan the entire partition for unreadable disk blocks caused by defects on the surface of the hard disk platters. This is useful if you have MFM, RLL, or older SCSI disks, and it never hurts (although it can be time-consuming). Properly working disks in most modern systems don’t require this step, because they have their own internal mechanisms for mapping out bad disk blocks.
Finally, there is a confirmation message because initialization will destroy any data previously on the partition. If all is well, select “Yes.” The screen will flash as the initialization program runs.
At this point, the next menu item presented should be “Initialize a Linux Partition.” If it isn’t, either you haven’t completed the disk partitioning process, or you haven’t made one of the menu choices dealing with your swap partition.
You can initialize a Linux partition, or alternately you can mount a previously initialized one. Note that dbootstrap will _not_ upgrade an old system without destroying it. If you’re upgrading, Debian can usually upgrade itself, and you won’t need to use dbootstrap. The Debian 2.1 release notes contain upgrade instructions[2].
[2] http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading- req.en.html
If you are using old disk partitions that are not empty, i.e., if you want to just throw away what is on them, you should initialize them (which erases all files). Moreover, you must initialize any partitions that you created in the disk partitioning step. About the only reason to mount a partition without initializing it at this point would be to mount a partition upon which you have already performed some part of the installation process using this same set of installation floppies.