Increase main partition size in Ubuntu within VMWare Fusion

That was well nigh impossible. GUI fail, on gparted's part.

These steps won't be 100% complete because it's 7:15am and i spent the last hour frying my brain on this stuff (after the brain unilaterally called a break about 2:15am and i fell asleep), but they do fill in some gaps other resources out there don't quite cover. Some even seem to (falsely) suggest that unallocated space must be made into its own partition first. Here are some of the better links; my (final working) steps below.

Resources

• [SOLVED] Expanding an Ubuntu System Partition
• Increase the size of your VMWare disk drive (QParted, maybe easier?)
• Reload this Page How to increase the home partition size in vmwared ubuntu
• Allocate unallocated space to a linux extended partition
• Boot VMWare from CD
• VMware Fusion - Increase virtual machine size

How to increase the /dev/sda1 partition size

1. Power down your virtual machine and use the VMWare Fusion Settings, Hard Disk to increase the VM's disk space allocation. Pre-allocated or not, doesn't matter. (Don't even think you're done, I'd done that step forever ago and it wasn't helping.)
2. Download the gparted live CD (.iso file) from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
3. Tell your VM to boot from that .iso- Settings CDs&DVDs, use disk image; and Settings, Advanced, Startup Device, switch from Hard Disk to CD/DVD.
4. Boot your VM and accept all gparted's default options.
5. In the graphical user interface for gparted, i had my main partition on the left, the swap partition inside a containing partition in the middle, and the unallocated space to the right. Partitions can only be expanded into contiguous unallocated space, and they cannot be moved around. So, the way to do it is:
   1. Expand the partition containing the swap partition rightward to use all the unallocated space (click resize/move, hover over the right end and drag when the cursor is an arrow).
   2. Move the swap partition all the way to the right within this now large partition.
   3. Go to the left, main partition we care about, and expand it rightward to take up the unallocated space that is now there in the front part of the swap-containing partition.
6. Put your CD&DVD and boot settings back to normal.
7. Boot up the virtual machine again, and enjoy all the space Ubuntu Linux now has.

Maybe someone will say i could have just created another partition and moved some stuff there, but i did not want to mess with such manual reallocation.