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Ovftool fails with error: vimfault.FileNotFound

In the past few weeks I had to move some VMs between standalone ESXi hosts, without any kind of shared storage, using OVF tool. Not going to cover the copy process using OVF, for that you can read William Lam blog post about it.

During the process of copying one of the VMs I received the following error: Error:vim.fault.FileNotFound. This error means that the VM has an ISO still connect to it. What you have to do is to go in the vSphere client and disconnect the ISO and after that the copying process will work.

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14 Comments

  1. andres andres

    thanks. that was it!

  2. Fabricio Fabricio

    Thanks dude, you save my day. Simple and effective.

  3. William William

    I get the same error message at the moment to import VM

  4. Diego Diego

    I receive the same error message, either when downloading or cloning the VM from VMWare Workstation … Restart the server, the PC from where I connect, I have the VMs turned off and without snapshot. Could you give me some hint of what it could be?
    Thank you very much

  5. Henry Henry

    Wow !!! Thanks a lot !!!

  6. Panos Panos

    Hey mate!
    Will I be able to use the image of the copied VM on another ESXi without the iso as we disconnected it?

  7. Failed – A general system error occurred: vim.fault.FileNotFound

    please told how to fix this issue on urgent please

    • michael michael

      Did you tried the steps from the post?

  8. Callazzans Callazzans

    Thanks my friend, solved my problem!

  9. Sonny Chacon Sonny Chacon

    Buenas tardes.
    Muchísimas gracias por la información, aca funciono perfecto con tu recomendacion.

  10. Denis Hempel Denis Hempel

    EN: For me I had to change the DVD drive to host device. Thanks for the helpful tip 🙂

    DE: Bei mir musste ich das DVD Laufwerk auf Host Gerät umstellen. Danke für den hilfreichen Tipp 🙂

  11. MME MME

    Thanks

  12. Cengiz Cengiz

    Hello,

    I was struggling since 1 day with this problem because the GUI don’t show an error.
    After installing ovftool, I found your post and it was the CD drive yes!

    As Denis mentioned, I had to pass from ISO to host device, even if the ISO is not connected.

    Thank you because even the error code is still not very verbose!

  13. Brian Seklecki Brian Seklecki

    Is there a switch/flag to OVFTOOL to skip/bypass exporting the optical / CD-ROM device (and potentially the associated ISO on the vSphere/VMFS/ESXi filesystem?)

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