It’s always a hassle to expand a disk within the Linux filesystem, but as always I like to keep it simple stupid and like to save time so I wrote a couple of steps to make it easy.

GParted stands for Gnome Partition Editor and you can use it for a lot more then just expanding a Linux partition. It can also create, format and delete partitions in a couple of minutes. (So be careful with what you’re doing)
The most common is that over time the filesystem just has to many files and the free disk space will become an issue.

So to expand, lets start with downloading the software needed from the https://gparted.org site and upload it to your datastore where the machine is hosted.

When your ISO is copied and pasted to where it needs to be we can go on to the machine itself. Unfortunately to use this software you have to shut down the Linux Operating System, so lets do that within the virtual environment and mount the GParted software to the CD/DVD-ROM drive of the virtual machine.

Side note! Its always important to have a backup or snapshot when playing with partitions and filesystems, so lets create a snapshot before you go!

For Linux to use the extra disk space it has to be made available first so lets expand the disk.

When you figured out the hard drive size you can agree with we can boot the machine again, this time with the GParted software starting.

When you pushed some buttons on your keyboard at the startup and found the GParted GUI it’s an easy job to select the right disk at the right top and choose to expand it. And that’s all!

When you reboot through the GUI it will ask you to detach the earlier attached ISO in you CD/DVD drive, and don’t forget to remove the snapshot when everything booted according to plan.

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