Michael,
see my other response too here for some more details of the explanation of why your workaround succeeded.
I have suggested that using the UI to temporarily disable a share to the second drive that is the smaller volume and not the target of the copy is simple and reasonably quick to implement.
I am in the process of waiting to get access to my work desktop machine to complete the more permanent workaround to complete the answer.
(Editing the VMX file for the virtual machine in question.)
The reason the default setting for a query of the volume space on the "Shared Folders" virtual folder returns the minimum drive space is to prevent the following issue: if you did perform a large file copy to shares of drives that were really not big enough, but you did export a share on a drive that did contain large enough space, the copy would fail but only when you have run down the disk space competely on the smaller target drive. That could lead to other issues depending on what the drive contained e.g. the OS X operating system.
The volume space check would not catch it.
The downside is the issue you and others are having here.
Please watch here for my follow up update on the VMX setting to return the maximum drive space available on the shares for the volume query instead of the minimum and you won't run into this issue again.
