Hi, Judging from the "file" output and the fact that you say the result is correct when removing "-f vmdk", it appears as if the input is in fact not in vmdk format but just a raw image. I don't know too much about vmdk, but I suppose that there is a descriptor file that goes aloing with that sk-R12-flat.vmdk (e.g. "sk-R12.vmdk"). So I guess sk-R12-flat.vmdk just contains the raw image data which is pointed to by e.g. sk-R12.vmdk, and the latter would be the file that qemu expects.
>From my perspective, giving the flat file a .vmdk extension is a misnomer, and qemu's vmdk driver is correct in rejecting it -- because it is just a raw file, so it should be handled by the raw driver. But maybe it is common enough that the vmdk driver should give a hint on that. Note that the VMware knowledge base (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1002511) specifically says that "VMDK" stands for the descriptor file, and it looks like even VMware would reject flat files without a descriptor file. Max -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1793016 Title: vmdk to cqow2 invalid VMDK image descriptor Status in QEMU: New Bug description: Greetings, CentOS 7.5.1804 Linux 3.10.0-862.11.6.el7.x86_64 qemu-img version 3.0.50 (v3.0.0-614-g19b599f) When trying to convert a vmdk flat file to qcow2 format, I get the following error message: qemu-img: Could not open './sk-R12-flat.vmdk': invalid VMDK image descriptor The command line used is root@s11kvm:/home/goinfre> qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 ./sk-R12-flat.vmdk ./sk-R12-flat.qcow2 "file sk-R12-flat.vmdk" returns: sk-R12-flat.vmdk: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3, boot drive 0x80, 1st sector stage2 0x40, GRUB version 0.97; partition 1: ID=0x63, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 16002 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x83, starthead 0, startsector 16065, 3084480 sectors; partition 3: ID=0x83, starthead 0, startsector 3100545, 3084480 sectors; partition 4: ID=0x5, starthead 0, startsector 6185025, 161581770 sectors, code offset 0x48 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1793016/+subscriptions
