This killer error would be enough to eat your productive time. Going through the forums does help you to fix this but the following are to be noted:
- OVA files are tar archive files with a .vmdk, .mf and .ovf files inside it.
- The files inside the OVA archives should be in specific order.
Here is what I had tried with no success:
- Unzipping the content, editing the respective files, zipping it again in .zip format and renaming to .ova. Used winrar tool for this. This may throw error "header not found".
- Using 7zip to extract the files, edit the required files and drag-drop updated files to 7zip. Just because 7zip utility changes the order of files in the archive, it gave error ".ovf file not found in the beginning of archive."
Solution:
Following steps are executed on a Linux machine. You may use tools such as cygwin to perform them on Windows.
- Rename the .ova file to .tar: mv myovafile.ova myovafile.tar
- List the .tar file to note down the order of its contents: tar -tf myovafile.tar
- Extract the tar archive: tar -xvf myovafile.tar
- Edit the .ovf file using text editor to have vmware.cdrom.remotepassthrough as rasd:ResourceSubType content for the rasd:ElementName with CD-ROM DVD value. You may refer VMware KB document.
- Calculate SHA1 for the .ovf file: sha1sum myovafile.ovf
- Update the SHA1 value to the .mf file using a text editor.
- Create tar file with the updated files. Pass files in the order they was displayed when step 2 was performed: tar -cvf mynewova.tar {fileslist_separated_by_space}
- Rename the file to have OVA extension: mv mynewova.tar mynewova.ova