How to increase the disk space of a VMware virtual disk?

Question

I have a VM running Ubuntu, and I wish to increase its size from 20 to 40 GB.

I powered off the VM and on the VMware side increased the allocated disk space. I did this by Edit Virtual Machine Settings -> Hard Disk -> Utilities and so forth. It then warned me that I should increase the partition size within the guest VM.

Looking at the disk usage analyzer inside of Ubuntu, it only currently sees the original 20 GB. How do I increase this to the 40 I allocated?

Solution

As it says, you need to increase the partition. Resizing the virtual disk, just changes how big partitions can be. You can't resize an active filesystem so the easiest way to do this is:

1. Boot the VM to a LiveCD ISO of Ubuntu (what you installed from should do but a later/earlier ISO will work too)
2. When asked click Try Ubuntu
3. Load gparted aka Gnome Partition Editor. I think it's installed on every CD but you might have to grab it from the Software Centre.
4. Find your disk, right click it and go through the resize wizard.
5. Restart the VM without the LiveCD and you should have more free space.

Comments

[iglen_]

Hope it's not to late, but for anyone who would encounter same problem, this was helpful to me. unix.stackexchange.com/a/196544

[Oli]

Mash F2 when it starts to boot (when the VMWare logo is on the screen). It'll either give you a BIOS screen where you can change the boot order, or a plain boot menu that'll let you select the CD.

[s.Daniel]

You might find yourself stuck at step no 4 and unable to resize the root partition since the swap partition is "in the way". What helped for me was to delete the swap partition, increase the size of the root and then create a new swap. Note: I am a newb when it comes to linux so backup before u try this and maybe someone can comment if my approach is correct.

[user280121]

@s.Daniel: you can move the swap partition to the rightmost in Gparted. The key is that you should move it in the enclosing extended partition, not just select the swap partition.