How to safely turn off swap permanently from Debian and reclaim the space

[Michael]

How to safely turn off swap permanently and reclaim the space​

First thing, Timeshift your computer, take a snapshot.

This tutorial uses both Terminal commands and a GUI. I have tried many different ways, this one works well and is the easiest to do.




If you have GParted open, close it. Its Swapoff feature does not appear to to be permanent.

Open terminal and become root (su); if you have sudo enabled, you may also do for example sudo -i; see man sudo for all options):

sudo -i

Turn off the particular swap partition and / or all of the swaps:

swapoff --all

Make 100% sure the particular swap partition partition is off:

cat /proc/swaps

Open a text editor you are skilled in with this file, e.g. nano if unsure:

nano /etc/fstab

Comment out / remove the swap partition's UUID, e.g.:

   # UUID=1d3c29bb-d730-4ad0-a659-45b25f60c37d    none    swap    sw    0    0

Open a text editor you are skilled in with this file, e.g. nano if unsure:

nano /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

Comment out / remove the previously identified swap partition's UUID, e.g.:

# RESUME=UUID=1d3c29bb-d730-4ad0-a659-45b25f60c37d

Don't close the terminal as you will need it later anyway.

Note: The next steps differ depending on, whether you rely on CLI or GUI.

GUI:

Open up GParted, either from menu, or more conveniently from the terminal we have opened:

gparted

If you don't have it installed, you may do so; afterwards run the previous command again:

apt-get install gparted

Choose your drive from top-right menu.

As the GParted reactivates the swap partition upon launch, you will have to right-click the particular swap partition and click Swapoff -> This will be applied immediately.

Delete the swap partition with right click -> Delete. You must apply the change now.

Resize your main / other partition with right click -> Resize/Move. You must apply the change now.

Back to the terminal, let's recreate the boot images:

update-initramfs -u -k all

Update GRUB:

update-grub

You may reboot now if you wish to test that the machine boots up.

sudo reboot

 

[Michael]

Notes:

If your swap partition is encrypted, then you also need to comment out the related line in /etc/crypttab, otherwise CryptSetup will keep you waiting for 90 seconds during boot time.

sudo nano /etc/crypttab