Can't import OVA file or unpack it with tar - eviltoast

I’m on an Arch-based Linux with VirtualBox (generic installer, couldn’t load modules with host-modules-arch) and I get this error whenever I try to import this OVA file:

Error reading OVA ‘…/coa-aio-newton.ova’ (VERR_TAR_UNEXPECTED_EOS) Result Code: VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0X80BB0005) Component: ApplianceWrap Interface: IAppliance {86a98347-7619-41aa-aece-b21ac5c1a7e6}

Apparently, these OVA files should be unpackable but tar doesn’t recognize it, and neither Ark or PeaZip can unzip this, but importing this OVA file works on Win 10.

I’ve tried using VMWare but that gave me an import error too. Why can’t virtualization work at all on Arch-based systems?

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    It looks like typical M$ EEE strategy, stage 2: extend standard to break compatibility. But OVA images produced by different virtualization systems are almost always incompatible to each other on the level of xml metadata. Seems that just one more level of incompatibility was added in archive format.

    What does the command file your_image.ova say?

    • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Well, I’ve downloaded the file and it is a correct tar archive.

      % file coa-aio-newton.ova          
      coa-aio-newton.ova: POSIX tar archive (GNU)
      % tar -tf coa-aio-newton.ova 
      coa-aio-newton.ovf
      coa-aio-newton_2_1-disk001.vmdk
      % sha256sum coa-aio-newton.ova 
      025fcb6e635e30d6592834aeba1649ef24a8c0fa079d1bbc9aa6290a8aa5e614  coa-aio-newton.ova
      

      According to coa-aio-newton.ovf, it is created in virtualbox.

      • PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyzOP
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        11 months ago
        $ file coa-aio-newton.ova
        coa-aio-newton.ova: ASCII text
        $ tar -tf coa-aio-newton.ova
        tar: This does not look like a tar archive
        tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
        
        

        Hmm interesting. Nevermind I have unpacked the ova file and exported the vmdk and ovf back to Linux. Thank you for your observation tho!

        • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          That file was downloaded wrong. I can guess that you used the broken dropbox link and this file contains a 404 page or you used git clone without git-lfs installed.

          • PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyzOP
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            11 months ago

            Absolutely right, I have only used git clone. Thank you for showing git-lfs, never heard of it before.