GParted Live CD and VirtualBox

The alternate title to this post might as well be: GParted Live CD won’t boot correctly on VirtualBox. 🙂

It just doesn’t, unless you make a specific modification to your Virtual Image.

I ran out of space on another virtual image, and had to extend the storage. That was when I tried to use GParted to get the job done, but I was stuck in the situation as depicted below, and couldn’t figure out how to get it solved.

GParted_VB_1

As you can see, no graphical interface. 😦

[Update: gedakc added another workaround, thank you!
(Link to other workaround not necessitating modifying the Virtual Image settings: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=761343#c10)]

Apparently, since GParted 0.22.x, support for UEFI motherboards has been added to the application, which results in the necessity for it to be set in VirtualBox. It might be a bug, but since the workaround is fairly easy I can live with that.

Go to the VirtualBox main interface, and select the desired Virtual Image. In my case it is called GParted. Open the settings panel for that Virtual Image.

GParted_VB_2

Navigate to the System section, and sleect the ‘Motherboard’ tab. Click ‘Enable EFI (special OSes only)’, and after that OK.

GParted_VB_3

All done! Start your Virtual Image, and you’re golden.

GParted_VB_4

Used software:

  • Oracle VirtualBox 5.0.20
  • GParted LiveCD 0.26.1-1 (gparted-live-0.26.1-1-amd64)