I love the Internet.

I have been putting together a pen-testing virtual machine lab to work through Georgia Weidman's Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking book that just came out. It's been years since I've done much of this and there are all kinds of new tools to use doing it so I want to scrape the rust off my skills. Part of the lab setup is a Kali Linux virtual machine on VirtualBox. I am used to setting up fairly lean Linux VMs to play with so I started off with just a 15 GB virtual disk and installed Kali to that disk.

Georgia has you set up a number of additional tools into the Kali Linux system and as I was installing the Android SDK and components for the mobile pen testing I ran out of room on that virtual drive. Ugh!

I didn't want to create a second drive and I didn't want to start over so I hit Google. Turns out VirtualBox includes a way to expand the size of the virtual disks and Jonathan Mifsud has an excellent how-to on his blog. He is working on a Linux host and I am on a Windows host but there wasn't much difference. Now I had a larger virtual disk.

Unfortunately, that new free space was not right next to the main partition so you cannot just expand it into the unused space. I had to move the swap partition to the end of the drive and open up the free space right next to the partition I wanted to expand. Luckily there's a good blog post by Eugene at trivialproof.blogspot.com. Since I'd already increased the size of my virtual disk I skipped down to step 4. Booting with the Kali Linux live ISO image I used GParted just as described and restructured my virtual disk.

Now I've got plenty of space and can keep on setting up the system to follow along with the book.

I'm sure there are other ways to have skinned this cat but those were the ones I found fast. Hard not to solve problems with the Internet these days if you at least know something about what you want to do.