How to boot from a live CD on an already installed Linux VMware workstation

[urielRv]

Hi everyone,

I'm running an Ubuntu 18 VM on VMware workstation, I already have a whole setup of my tools for network automation in that VM but unfortunately (as a newbie) I did only allocated 20GB of disk space, as expected I'm running out of space. I increased another 10GB but it appears as unallocated space and I can't expand my ext4 partition using those 10GB. Many articles out there says that this is only possible from live CD, but it won't start by only changing the VM settings to start from the Ubuntu ISO.

Does anyone know how to achieve this so I can run Gparted in live CD and do my partition table changes?

Thank you in advance.

[RDPetruska]

1. Make sure the cd-rom device is set to 'connected at power on'
2.  Either be ready - as soon as you power on the VM, click the mouse inside the window to set focus, then hit whatever keystroke to bring up the boot device menu.  -OR-
3. Use the Workstation menu VM-->Power-->Power On to Firmware to start the VM at the BIOS screen.  from there you can select to boot from the CD-ROM.

[urielRv]

Thank you so much for your help.

This is what I ended up doing:

1. I did what you said: Make sure the cd-rom device is set to 'connected at power on'

2. Open the .vmx configuration file inside the path where the VM's files are stored

2. Add or edit this line: bios.bootDelay = "20000"

3. In the step above, I put 20,000 miliseconds that is 20 seconds, this made the VM to stop at the POST screen and gave enough time to see which key type to choose a boot source

4. My VM started from the live CD and I did the normal process to resize my primary partition

After the process above, I turned off and on again my VM and so far so good, I can see my new disk space allocated.

Thank you.

[gtapias]

Thank you for your detailed explanation of how you achieved it.

Without it, I would still be lost.