Surgient Success

Expanding Image Disk Size and Partitioning on ESX hosts.

 The following instructions must be performed in a staging environment.

Expanding an image's disk.

-- Shutdown the image

-- Commit the image

-- Run   vmkfstools -X 40G --force data:filename.vmdk (where 40G is the size of the partition you want to expand to.)

-- Attach partitioning software of choice and make sure the CMOS settings allow you to boot to a CD/DVD.

-- Power up and run partitioning software increasing the partition size.

-- Reboot once.

-- Shutdown the image after reboot

-- Commit the image.

Adding a partition to an image.

-- Shutdown the image

-- Commit the image

-- Let's say you have an image with a 15 GB disk and want to add a second partition that is 25 GB, you would run

                                       vmkfstools -X 40G --force data:filename.vmdk.

--  Attach partitioning software of choice and make sure the CMOS settings allow you to boot to a CD/DVD.

-- Power up and run partitioning software increasing the partition size.

-- Reboot once.

-- Shutdown the image after reboot

-- Commit the image.

 Instead of setting the boot parameter in the BIOS, you can also hit F2 while booting to get a boot menu.

Are you sure it's not ESC to get the boot media menu?  The console has to have focus and you have to be fast on the draw to use this option.

 I could be wrong on the keypress.  It is displayed as an option on the boot screen. 

I do not think it is any harder than trying to get into the BIOS to change the boot order.