[vox-tech] SuSE - Debian Swap Conflict

[Robert G. Scofield]

I'm sorry if this message gets out twice, but Kmail seems to have eaten my 
first try.

I've got a strange error message regarding my Swap partition.  Here's the 
background:

I have my main Linux distro, SuSE 9.2, on hdb2.  I had a duplicate copy of 
this distro on hdb3.  I installed Debian over the duplicate on hdb3.  When 
installing Debian, the installer would not go forward unless /dev/hdb5 was 
formatted in addition to hdb3.  Hdb5 is my swap partition.

After rebooting after the Debian install, SuSE would not boot.  I used a SuSE 
rescue CD which fixed a FSTAB entry, and now SuSE boots.  But while using the 
SuSE rescue CD I got an error message saying that /dev/hdb5 contains an 
unknown file system.

Everything seems to be working and I just put in the rescue CD to check once 
more for problems.  When the rescue utility starts I get a box with this 
message:

"Activate Swap Partition /dev/hdb5

The partition /dev/hdb5 has the file system ID 130 and contains a valid swap 
area.  Activating this swap partition increases the performance of the repair 
tool.  Press "Yes" to activate the swap partition."

After I press "Yes" and the repair tool continues to do its work it ultimately 
returns this error message:  "/dev/hdb5 contains unknown file system."

While SuSE seems to be working, I haven't used it much as I'm downloading 
Debian packages.  But I'm wondering if SuSE is activating the swap partition 
when it boots.  I didn't realize that there was more than one swap file 
system.  I thought swap was swap.  But note that SuSE is using reiserfs and 
Debian is using ext3.  So here are some questions:

1)  Will SuSE run into problems if I start doing some memory intensive work, 
or do you think SuSE is activating swap when it boots?

2)  Since SuSE is my main system and Debian is just a training tool, is there 
some way to re-partition the swap partition in the way SuSE's reiserfs likes?

Thank you.

Bob