Qemu.img: conversion of a VMDK image failed with error “invalid VMDK image descriptor”

conversionqemuvmware-vmdk

I trying to convert a VMDK image (Windows installed) to RAW format with the qemu-img command. However, it is failing with the following error:

   $ qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw image.vmdk /tmp/image.img
   qemu-img: Could not open 'image.vmdk': invalid VMDK image descriptor
   qemu-img: Could not open 'image.vmdk'

As far as I can tell, the image itself seems fine, at least I can boot properly from it using VMWare Player.
I'm using qemu-img version 2.0.0.

Best Answer

Do not use the .vmdk image itself but the smaller .vmdk file which references the image.

Related Solutions

Fix qemu-img Conversion Error for VMDK Image

A bug related to this was fixed in qemu version 1.2.0. Ubuntu 12.04 has an older qemu version, but if you install qemu-img from source code

user@ubuntu:/tmp$ sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
user@ubuntu:/tmp$ wget http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-1.2.0.tar.bz2
user@ubuntu:/tmp$ tar xfj qemu-1.2.0.tar.bz2
user@ubuntu:/tmp$ cd qemu-1.2.0
user@ubuntu:/tmp/qemu-1.2.0$ ./configure && make qemu-img

the conversion runs without errors

user@ubuntu:/tmp/qemu-1.2.0$ cd /tmp
user@ubuntu:/tmp$ /tmp/qemu-1.2.0/qemu-img convert -O qcow2 PfamWeb_20120124_2-disk1.vmdk PfamWeb_20120124_2.qcow2
user@ubuntu:/tmp$

Poor performance with vmdk mounted as loop device even after conversion to raw

Don't back up the entire VM. Depending on the application, you should be able to do some application-level replication. Also just filling a VMDK file via rsync is not the same as backing up the VM. There are intangibles like locked files in use, databases (if applicable) and configuration files that may need to be copied over separately.

Overall this is a poor idea and will probably not provide the recovery plan your employers are expecting. Also, external USB drives do not belong in production.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Fix qemu-img Conversion Error for VMDK Image

Poor performance with vmdk mounted as loop device even after conversion to raw

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