VMWAre OVFtool export fails with error "Failed to create directory"

I am trying to export a VM using OVFtool running on a windows server

ovftool.exe --allowExtraConfig  --noImageFiles --noSSLVerify "vi://xx.xx.xx.xx/myVM"    "c:\myPath"
Enter login information for source vi://xx.xx.xx.xx/
Username: myid
Password: ************
Opening VI source: vi://[email protected]:443/myVM
Opening OVF target: "C:\mypath"
Error: Failed to create directory: "c:\myPath"
Warning:
- ExtraConfig option 'nvram' is not allowed, will skip it.
- ExtraConfig options exists in source. 

I interrogated vi://[email protected]

ovftool.exe  --noSSLVerify "vi://xx.xx.xx.xx/"

and determined that source path "vi://[email protected]:443/myVM" is valid

I have permissions to create target path

I tried all conceivable OVFtool options --noSSLVerify --allowAllExtraConfig --noImageFiles without much avail

I also ensured there arent amy CD drives on my VMS pointing to images.

How do I debug this ?

Any inputs welcome

Thanks

Yogesh

you can use the logging options of ovftool for debugging, something like

ovftool.exe --X:logFile=ovftool-log.txt --X:logLevel=verbose ...

Use --help for more logging options.

For your particular case have you already created the output directory or not? Try to pre-create it. Also try to run ovftool.exe "as Administrator" to ensure that the process really has the expected permissions.

So I figured that ovftool seems to have challanges parsing the path names ( at least on windows ... and I am guessing owing to a bug . It could be problem dealing with drive names with : and/or reverse slashes ... )

I have a working solution with a simple tweak as follows that allows me to get my job done .

Basically pre create target directly manually and navigate to that path and then when running ovftool - spec just specify the VM name minus the path in the destination spec

cd  "c:\myPath"
ovftool.exe --allowExtraConfig  --noImageFiles --noSSLVerify "vi://xx.xx.xx.xx/myVM"  myVM
 

Cheers