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This tip is about the how to Extract Files from a VMware Disk Image on Your Windows PC. So read this free guide, How to Extract Files from a VMware Disk Image on Your Windows PC step by step. If you have query related to same article you may contact us.
How to Extract Files from a VMware Disk Image on Your Windows PC – Guide
You may need to access the contents of a virtual machine’s virtual disk (VMDK) occasionally, possibly to recover data after a VM has died. Maybe a recent update prevents you from starting the guest OS and you don’t have any backups to fall back on. Occurs! In this article, I will go through four distinct methods to extract content from VMDK files.
Just a quick reminder that a VMDK is done up of two parts: the descriptor and the flat file. Disk geometry, IDs and virtual hardware version are all stored in the descriptor file. It is simply a text file that can be viewed in any text editor. The actual data is stored in the flat file. See The Anatomy of a VMware Virtual Machine for more information.
How to do this
Method 1 – Attaching a VMDK to an existing VM
As trivial as it may seem, an easy way to access the contents of a VMDK is to simply attach it to another working VM. It doesn’t matter if the VM is hosted on ESXi, Workstation or some other hypervisor.
The following video shows how to attach the VMDK file from a Windows 7 VM hosted on ESXi 6.5 to a VM running on VMware Workstation Pro just to demonstrate cross-hypervisor functionality.
TIP: As shown in the video, when using Workstation, you may experience compatibility issues that may prevent you from attaching the VMDK to the VM. The problem is usually related to an unsupported virtual hardware version. This is easily fixed by changing the hardware version value in the descriptor file to the one supported by VMware Workstation. To do this, take a look at the VMDK descriptor file of any VM running on the workstation. This will give you the supported hardware version or refer to the online documentation.
Method 2 – Using 7-Zip
7-Zip is probably the most popular compression tool, not because it’s freely available for Windows, Linux, and other operating systems. It will pretty much extract any type of file you throw at it.
This is all good news as it will happily open VMDKs without needing the descriptor file. To do this, simply right-click the VMDK flat file and select Open Archive to copy the contents of the VMDK to a folder of your choice. Alternatively, extract the entire contents of the disk using the Extract to Folder functionality. The method works for VMDKs previously attached to Windows or Linux.
Method 3 – VMware Workstation Player
If you have VMware Workstation Player or PRO installed, you can mount the VMDK directly as volumes in Windows. For this method to work, you must place the descriptor and the flat files in the same folder. The VMDK can be mounted as a read-only or read-write volume by right-clicking in Windows Explorer, choosing one of two options.
This works for both Windows and Linux VMDKs, however Windows cannot natively read Linux filesystems so you will need to use some third party tool like Explore2fs or Ext2Read to do this.
Method 4 – Linux Reader
Linux Reader is a free tool distributed by DiskInternals. It is used to mount or provide access to various file systems configured on Linux machines. These include Ext2/3/4, HFS and ReiserFS. It is also able to mount VMDKs right away, which is the only feature we are behind.
You can download Linux Reader. After installing it, select the Mount Image option from the Drives menu. Then select Containers -> VMware virtual disks and press Next.
Mounting VMDK Disks Using Linux Reader from DiskInternals
Then navigate to the folder that contains the VMDK files and press OK to select it. On the next screen, check the boxes next to the VMDKs you want to be mounted and click Mount. As per the next screenshot, I have selected two VMDKs; an ext4 formatted disk from a Centos VM and an NTFS from a Windows VM.
Selecting Multiple VMDKs to Mount as Disks in Linux Reader
The software will first look for Raid Arrays. The previously selected VMDK files are then mounted and conveniently highlighted in red as shown below.
Clicking on a mounted volume will give you access to the contents of the drive. They can be saved by right-clicking the file selection and clicking Save. Alternatively, use CTRL-A to select all content and click the Save icon to export all to a folder of your choice.
Final note
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