[please disregard]

At no point in the process will you transfer a VDI file to the Linode. You need to transfer the actual contents of the disk onto the Linode's disk. That's why you boot into some rescue distro locally and on the Linode, and use dd over SSH to do a bit-for-bit copy of the contents of the local device. The ssh-copy guide tells you how to perform SSH over dd to move disk images, if you want to push rather than pull, just adjust the command to do that.

- Les