I’ve been greeted with that error message for quite a long time now on my Ubuntu loading screen and it was today that I finally fixed it.

I do not know the entire technical details of what all is going on, but I just want to share what I did so that it may help someone out there.

This error came the day when I installed Debian on a primary partition. My Hard disk right now is as follows:

I installed Debian by partitioning the third primary partition into two ( 7 and 7), thus having a total of four primary partitions. It worked fine. But thereafter whenever I booted into Ubuntu, I got the aforementioned error message. Not only that, but the hibernation option was missing too. Even though I copied the Debian partition back into the extended partition at /dev/sda10 (see figure) using Gparted, the problem still persisted.

I figured out it had something to do with my fstab file. You can get yours at /etc/fstab. In this file, along with the partitions present for /, /home and /var (see the figure) , it showed the same UUID that was in the error message with a comment saying that ‘swap was initially on /dev/sda8 at the time of installation’.

Heck it was still there. So somehow its UUID had got twisted. How that happened, I have no clue.

So here is what I did.

I have 11.04 installed side by side. So I mounted that and accessed its fstab file. There it had the swap partition defined well as follows:

UUID=31b658b3-4a87-454f-b514-6dd5d647a159 none            swap    sw              0       0

I copied that into the fstab file of my ubuntu 10.04 replacing the error UUID. Saved it and there was no more error message the next time I booted. Plus, the hibernation option came back. (NOTE: In order to edit the fstab file, you need to open it as root. So do sudo gedit fstab)

So all you have to do is to replace the UUID. To find out the UUID of a partition you can do:

sudo blkid /dev/sda#

and you will get that partition’s UUID. Gparted can also provide you with this information.

Hope that helps.