Comment 4 for bug 201358

There are three issues here. I think the bug is in virtualbox's vditool.

First, ext3 supports sparse files, which means that runs of zeros aren't actually stored anywhere on disk. The .img file is probably sparse, so the reported filesize is to be expected. You can check the actual size of a file with "du -h filename".

The next issue is that qemu-img created a very large file for some reason. If the image size was set to be 78GB in vmware, then qemu-img is behaving correctly as well.

Finally, (on my hardy system) vditool's converter from RAW files doesn't seem to consider sparse files when it decides whether or not it has enough space to convert a raw disk image to vdi format.

Marcoba's computer has 29GB free, and the vmware file is 9GB, so there should be enough space.

vditool should probably determine the true size of sparse dd image files (like du does) before refusing to convert the image, or at least provide a --force option.