Converting from VMDK to RAW

[Victor Sudakov]

Victor Sudakov wrote:
> 
> I have downloaded the VM disk from VMware ESXi and the image consists
> of two files: myhost-flat.vmdk and myhost.vmdk. The latter is a small
> text file containing meta-information about the disk. The former looks
> like a RAW disk, at least I can mdconfig it and mount the
> partitions.
> 
> $ file "myhost-flat.vmdk"
> myhost-flat.vmdk: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0xee, start-CHS (0x0,0,2), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 1, 20971519 sectors
> 
> the problem is that sysutils/vmdktool does not recognize either of
> them:
> 
> $ vmdktool -i myhost.vmdk
> myhost.vmdk: File too small (must be at least 1024 bytes)
> $ vmdktool -i myhost-flat.vmdk
> myhost-flat.vmdk: Bad VMDK magic (got 8ec031fc, want 564d444b)
> $
> 
> Probably I don't need any converters at all because the *-flat.vmdk is
> already a RAW image.

I've even been able to reduce the on-disk size of the image from 10G
to 3,4G with "dd conv=sparse" without any ill effects.


-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
sip:sudakov at sibptus.tomsk.ru