Help! VBoxManage modifyhd --compact => VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED

[tedatte]

Okay, this is a weird one. I have used the --compact option many times, but for some reason, VBoxManage bombs on this newly built VM's disk image.

When I execute the command "VBoxManage modifyhd vmDisk.vdi --compact", I get the error message "VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED VBoxManage: error: Compact hard disk operation for this format is not implemented yet!".

Any ideas?

Thanks,
t

The VDI is dynamic (80 GiB with 23 GiB used).
The host system is Ubuntu x64 10.10.
The guest is Windows 7x64 with Guest Additions installed (although that should not matter).
VirtualBox is 4.1.4 r74291

[tedatte]

Hello, is there anybody out there?

[Perryg]

Post the results of VBoxManage showhdinfo /<absolute-path>/<guest-name>.vdi

[tedatte]

That is interesting; per Perryg, the showhdinfo results are below.

The results show that the storage format is VMDK, which I am guessing is the problem? Just to try it out, I created a bare VM with dynamic VDI hard disk. When I did the showhdinfo command on the newly created drive, it also shows the storage format as VMDK.

This raises a couple more questions:

* Why VMDK? The virtual hard disk was created using the VDI format.

* Does appliance export/import alter the virtual hard disk? The reason for this question is that we recently replaced our host system and used the appliance export/import to maintain context with the move to the new machine (as an aside, this did not work anyway-Windows 7 still had to be re-activated).

* If export/import is the cause of the problem, is it possible to fix the virtual disk?

Thanks,
t

UUID: d7ad1f5a-5901-4946-9d00-594823dc5216
Accessible: yes
Logical size: 81920 MBytes
Current size on disk: 24155 MBytes
Type: normal (base)
Storage format: VMDK
Format variant: dynamic default
In use by VMs: vmXXXXX (UUID: b8714520-2c0b-4399-b931-e7dc61e6408a)
Location: /mnt/drive2/VirtualBox/vmXXXXX/vmXXXXX.vdi

[Perryg]

Export/import does in fact change the file to vmdk. You can safely convert it back to vdi with the following

Code: Select all

VBoxManage clonehd <uuid>|<filename> <uuid>|<outputfile>
                  [--format VDI|VMDK|VHD|RAW|<other>]
                  [--variant Standard,Fixed,Split2G,Stream,ESX]
                  [--existing]

And then selecting the new one from the storage section.

[tedatte]

Thanks, I will try that. :-)