I burned the gparted iso to a physical disk, then switched the VM CD/DVD to physical drive auto-detect. The VM found the cd/dvd, connected, and quick as a flash ... I got the grub bootloader menu. So:
- Why isn't the virtual BIOS ignoring the HD and going to the CD/DVD that it has detected and connected to? No idea.
- Despite suggestions to the contrary it looks like you can't expand the partition after the fact, at least with Linux Mint 14. To do so requires a third party partitioning software that has to run in the VM from a live CD, which can't be done (see preceding bullet).
- The solution seems to be a complete reinstall of the VM in VMPlayer or find an alternative to VMPlayer that allows partition expansion with Linux Mint 14.
FTR: Running VMPlayer with Linux Mint 14, on Win7 host consisting of an AMD 1090 Hex core, 16GB RAM.