VBoxManage clonehd fails with VERR_DISK_FULL also when the disk has enough room

[Lucio Crusca]

VirtualBox 3.2.8/Ubuntu 10.4 here. I have to convert a VDI image in RAW format, the image is on external USB disk, NTFS format, mounted r/w with ntfs-3g, with 170GB free space.

lucio@precision:/media/31ED5EDD5037DAE5/lucio/.VirtualBox/HardDisks$ df -h
File system           Size  Used Avail. Use% Mounted on
  ...
/dev/sdb1             299G  129G  170G  44% /media/31ED5EDD5037DAE5

lucio@precision:/media/31ED5EDD5037DAE5/lucio/.VirtualBox/HardDisks$ VBoxManage showhdinfo XP.vdi 
Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.8
(C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

UUID:                 317818f6-065a-44e5-8ffb-d13bd5d063bf
Accessible:           yes
Description:          
Logical size:         40711 MBytes
Current size on disk: 3208 MBytes
Type:                 normal (base)
Storage format:       VDI
Location:             /media/31ED5EDD5037DAE5/lucio/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/XP.vdi

and now the problem:

lucio@precision:/media/31ED5EDD5037DAE5/lucio/.VirtualBox/HardDisks$ VBoxManage clonehd XP.vdi XP.raw --format RAW
Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.8
(C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

0%...FAILED
Error: failed to clone hard disk. Error message: Could not create the clone medium '/home/lucio/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/XP.raw'.
Raw: disk would overflow creating image '/home/lucio/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/XP.raw' (VERR_DISK_FULL)

[Lucio Crusca]

I've just tried with the same VDI file on a ext3 fs with 72GB free, internal Sata disk. Same problem there also. We should remove USB and ntfs-3g keywords, they are clearly not related to the bug, but I can't find how to remove them.

[Lucio Crusca]

Please close this bug, it was my fault. I didn't notice that VBoxManage always tries to put the output file in the user's home directory, unless a full absolute path is specified as output file. The only thing that could be improved is a bit of documentation of this behaviour ("man VBoxManage" says it's undocumented).