Downloaded .vmdk fails to load in Windows (only)

[Doug B]

I am a recent addition to the Virtual Box community, and I have an issue.

I downloaded Virtual Box 4.2.6 r 82870 to my Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 computer (64-bit, i7-2600K CPU)

I also added vagrant.

I added the standard precise 64 box to my computer and it loaded correctly.

I added a VM Box from Datasciencetoolkit and it failed to load giving me:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Failed to import appliance (PATH)\.vagrant.d\boxes\dstk\box.ovf.

Could not create the clone medium (PATH)\VirtualBox VMs\dstk_vagrant_1359237564\box-disk1.vmdk'.

VMDK: Compressed image is corrupted (PATH)\.vagrant.d\boxes\dstk\box-disk1.vmdk' (VERR_ZIP_CORRUPTED).

Result Code: VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)
Component: Appliance
Interface: IAppliance {3059cf9e-25c7-4f0b-9fa5-3c42e441670b}
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I talked to the site that provides the .vmdk and they told me that
a) I was the first windows user (lucky me)
b) It had loaded correctly on other operating systems.

I traced it though some of the VBoxManage code, but it seems to think it has an invalid checksum somewhere.

Anyone able to help out on this?

Doug

[mpack]

The error message appears quite readable to me. If VirtualBox tells you the zip is corrupted - then it's corrupted. You need to compare checksums with the download site and take action from there (e.g. download again or tell them their appliance is corrupt).

[Doug B]

So its possible that they same .vmdk zip file is corrupt only in the windows implementation of Virtual Box but not other implementations?

[mpack]

I refer you to the error message. I will not discuss what other people tell you about it. If you doubt the error message then run a checksum test, speculation is pointless.

[Doug B]

Returning to the same error. The checksum (MD5, SHA-1) for the .vmdk file is the same both at my machine and at the site (worked with the site owner on this). This .vmdk is usuable by other (non-Windows) versions of VirtualBox. I am the first (or only) Windows 7 user of that is downloading this VirtualBox. Since the checksums validate, and other instances of VirtualBox (on other OS's) seem to work, I wonder if this is a Windows specific problem with very large VMs. Has anyone had issues with large .vdmk's and Windows 7?

[mpack]

Well, if the OVA is ok then perhaps there is a problem with the contents after they are unpacked. How much working space does your host drive have, and what filesystem does it use? If you have the OVA located on a secondary drive then I'd want those questions answered for that drive too. Also, how big is the OVA file?

[Doug B]

Host drive has 793 GB free (out of 931 GB).

There is only 1 drive.

The .vmdk file in question is 4.39 GB.

Host OS: Windows 7
Host Drive: NTFS
No Disk Quotas
Target OS: Ubuntu_64

I don't have an ".OVA" file, I have a ".OVF" and a ".VMDK" file. Virtual Box is complaining about the ".VMDK" file.
Is there a checksum (MD5/SHA-1) embedded in the .OVF file that I can verify against the .VMDK file?

Is there anything in the .ovf file that would help?

[mpack]

Hmm. I was going by the VERR_ZIP_CORRUPTED error token. I don't use export/import, but I guessed that the OVA format, which I know is an archive version of the separate OVF and VMDK files, may be implemented as a ZIP containing those files. If you aren't using OVA then it must be referring to the compression used by the VMDK itself, which means that the VMDK is corrupted, which means that we now have a contradiction in the facts presented to me: you previously told me that the VMDK passes an md5 checksum test. If that is true then the VMDK is corrupted at source.

Additional observation: the VMDK being slightly larger than 4GB suggests how it came to be corrupted, i.e. at some point it was stored on a FAT formatted partition, FAT having a 4GB file size limit.

[mpack]

Incidentally, where did you download this from? I've had a quick look at the official Vagrant website and see a bunch of Linux packages available for download, but no VMWare appliance.

[Doug B]

Downloaded via vagrant with link:

vagrant box add dstk http://static.datasciencetoolkit.org/dstk_0.41.box

From data science toolkit site.

I will ask if the vmdk was copied through a FAT partition.

My forum thread on their discussion site is : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... ssrLbEDem8

[mpack]

What is a ".box" file? At over 4GB I'm not going to download it myself to find out!

[Doug B]

The .box file is the tar of the .ovf and the .vmdk file.

[mpack]

And when you said earlier than you had checksummed the VMDK, did you mean that, or did you actually checksum the .box file? - because my suggestion about unpacking a zip applies equally well to unpacking a tar.

Edit:  I've now read the forum thread you linked to. I see that in fact the original checksum tested was for the .box file. That should at least rule out a bad download. The acid test is the vmdk checksums, end to end. Perhaps your tar tool doesn't like >4GB files?

[Pete Warden]

Just a quick note from the creator of the original .box file, to confirm what Doug has been seeing. I've had multiple users on other platforms able to run the file, with the checksum as both Doug and I see it, so we are trying to dig deeper to figure out why this is failing.

[mpack]

Hi, thanks for going through the OSSO procedure to join in. As I mentioned above, it would be useful to have clarity on whether the end to end VMDK files have been checksum tested. So far it looks like only the box files that have been proved good.