It's been a while since I really administered a Linux machine (which makes me sad now that I think of it), but doesn't the swap partition have to be formatted with mkswap before it's usable? And is it possible for the swap partition format to get corrupted if the machine goes down hard, as the empeg regularly does? Like I said, I'm not at all sure about either of those things, but, if that's the solution used, he might need to be aware of that potential issue.