I'm having the same problem. I downloaded a VDMK from ESXi 3.5 Update 1 and tried the took. I tried both the regular vdmk and the -flat.vdmk, but neither work. Disk compression is not on for the drive/folder.
Thierry_M:I check files, folder, and disk are not compressed and I still got this error. Conversion works with the sample davidb indicate.
It seems the image can be in different formats. The converter needs a specific one ?