qemu: "not a bootable disk"

So I followed exactly the instructions on how to run QEMU-KVM with VMware's disk images v6 directly:

 kvm -drive file=zimbra-000001.vmdk,boot=on -net nic,macaddr=00:0c:29:c3:93:b9 -net tap -uuid 564d3f3d-3280-5bf2-9431-21c9b2c393b9

(replacing the various parameters with my own, of course, after looking them up in the VMX configuration file)

And instead of seeing the VM starting (as I am used to from my VMWare Workstation 6.5, running on an older Ubuntu), I receive:

Boot failed: not a bootable disk

I am running Ubuntu 14.04. Is there anything else that I needed to do before attempting this shortcut?

1 Answer

I think that it assumes that the drive is of type RAW, but it looks like you're using vmdk. I would check the disk type in the machine's current config and make sure that it is trying to read a disk of type vmdk