Obscuratta with Ubuntu, VMWare Fusion, and GParted
I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows on my Mac, but I also use it to run several veriations of Linux for my web development. I invested some time to get a version of Ubunutu (Hardy Heron) up and running with Komodo Edit, Rapid VSN and some other goodies. Well, as usually happens I ran out of disk space and I was trying to figure out how to grow it.
VMWare Fusion 2.0 to the rescue… nearly. VMWare Fusion 2.0 has some very nice features. I like the virtual machine menu and it’s screen snapshots.
The machine settings are greatly enhanced and one feature I really like is that you can resize the hard disk. However, adding more space to the virtual machine doesn’t mean your guest operating system will see it.
To get the guest to see it, you need a tool called gparted. GParted-Live CD is a nifty application that comes bundled with a linux kernal. It essentially lets you boot off a CD and run a program so none of your hard drives are mounted inside your virtual machine. What I did was to shut down my virtual machine, resize the hard drive, and point the CD Rom Drive at the GParted-Live CD.
I then restarted the virtual machine, and hit F2 entering the Bios / System Setup. I escallated the CD above the hard drive in boot order and saved my changes. GParted Booted like a champ. That’s when I got stuck.
GParted Wouldn’t Let Me Resize My Partitions
I had added plenty of partition space but GParted, refused to let me resize my primary partion. After a lot of reading I came across this tid-bit. GParted can not move the beginning of a partition. Because I had a swap partion at the end of my old logical drive, I couldn’t expand into the new drive space.
The Fix That Worked For Me
You’re milage may vary. Long story short, I deleted the swap partion. This allowed me to resize the initial partition. I then created a new Swap Partion (ext2) and then added a logical partition (linux-swap). Saved all my changes. (It took a good 5-10 minutes to for Gparted to added 10GB of storage (I went from 10 to 20). Then finish the other changes. After a restart I was up and running.
It wasn’t completely clear why I couldn’t resize my partitions, but this change worked for me. I hope it helps someone else.
References:
VMWare Fusion Expanding a Disk – A Well written guide with screen captures. It apparently was written before VMWare Fusion 2.0 so doesn’t mention that VMF2 has built in resizing. No need to download a tool or use command line. Just delete your snapshots and resize the disk. After that the real fun begins.
How To Resize Linux Partition – Mentions GParted Forums that eventually lead me to the solution.
