These software just take a VMDK file and mount it as a virtual hard drive in Windows. You just have to use these software and then they will take care of the rest. They offer you a lot of options for the final virtual drive that they will create and if you want then you can mount a virtual drive as a removable drive. You can give any drive letter to the newly created drive and you can unmount it quickly as well. Also, before starting with this post, I will suggest you to use 7-Zip in case, you only want to access files inside a VMDK file.
Passmark OSFMount is one of the best free software to mount various kind of image files pretty easily. You can use this software to mount a lot of files such as ISO, NRG, VHD, and of course VMDK. This software natively supports VMDK file and in just a few click, you can mount that as a virtual drive in Windows. After you give it a VMDK file, it analyzes it and then it will list the partitions that it has inside. It lets you choose desired letter for the virtual drive it will create and then you can use this software to quickly mount multiple VMDK files if you have any.
Mount VMDK File in Windows with these Free VMDK mounter Software
ImDisk is an interesting software to mount VMDK files as virtual drives in Windows. It gets integrated in the Windows context menu and lets you mount any VMDK file with a simple option. With this software, you can mount a VMDK file in read only mode and as a removable drive as well. It lets you choose a desired drive letter for the virtual drive and you can opt to keep the mounted drive in explorer even if the system restarts. And not only VMDK files, but using this powerful software, you can mount certain other types of disk images and virtual hard disks such as VHD.
These are the best free software to mount VMDK files in Windows 10. You can use them and mount any VMDK file in Windows pretty quickly. You can use any method that you can think will be best for you. Also, you can go with the command line tool if you are good with CMD and like command line tools. But if you want to do that as quickly as possible then use the other software that I have mentioned above. So, if you are looking for some free VMDK mounter software for Windows, this post can help you.
A virtual disk descriptor is represented as plain text. On the left side of the screenshot below, you can see a virtual disk descriptor of the ESXi format (a vmdk file that can be opened with any text editor). On the right side of the screenshot, you can set eyes on the data of the virtual disk descriptor that is embedded into a single vmdk file of the VMware Workstation format. The vmdk file is opened in HEX editor.
On the screenshot below, have a look at two virtual disk files opened in HEX editor. The same operating system is installed on both virtual disks (the first partition used for installing the OS was created and formatted with a built-in Windows disk utility). On the left side of the screenshot a -flat.vmdk file is displayed (ESXi format). The raw data is written from 0x00000000 on this virtual disk -flat.vmdk file. On the right side of the screenshot, the virtual disk of the Workstation format is displayed and the same data is written from 0x00150000 (byte number 5376) which is not the beginning of the vmdk file.
As you recall, a virtual disk of the ESXi format consists of vmdk and -flat.vmdk files. You need to download both files to your machine where VMware Workstation or VMware Player is installed. When you download a virtual disk from the ESXi datastore with VMware HTML5 vSphere Client, these two files are packed into a one zip archive.
Now you can see two files of the ESXi-format virtual disk that have been downloaded in a ZIP archive. The size of the thin provisioned virtual disk on the VMFS datastore is about 2GB now (see the screenshot above) and the size of the same disk downloaded to a workstation machine is about 8GB (see the screenshot below). Unzip the two files from the archive. By default, the files are extracted to the Win-test2.vmdk directory whose name is the same as the archive name without a file extension.
Now you are able open the /mnt/vmdk/ directory in your Linux file explorer and browse files and directories located on the VMDK virtual disk. You can see Snapshot1.txt and Snapshot2.txt files which were created after creating the first and second snapshots in this example. Each of these two files is located on the separate delta VMDK virtual disk.
Loop devices are pseudo-devices in Linux that make files accessible as block devices and can be used to mount disk images that contain file systems. Loop devices are named as /dev/loopX where X is the number of the loop device. This method is good to mount -flat.vmdk files even without a virtual disk descriptor.
Understanding how to open vmdk files and extract content from VMDK files is important if something goes wrong with a virtual machine. Knowing multiple methods of extracting VMDK content gives you the power of choice because the different methods can each be the best option in certain situations. Moreover, it is even better to have backups of your VMs in addition to that knowledge.
OSFMount also supports the creation of RAM disks, basically a disk mounted into RAM. This generally has a large speed benefit over using a hard disk. As such this is useful with applications requiring high speed disk access, such a database applications, games (such as game cache files) and browsers (cache files). A second benefit is security, as the disk contents are not stored on a physical hard disk (but rather in RAM) and on system shutdown the disk contents are not persistent. At the time of writing, we believe this is the fastest RAM drive software available.
Win 7 SP1, Win 8, Win 10 and Win 11 Windows Server 2008, 2012 (Windows Server 2016 has issues) 64bit support (For 32-bit support, please use OSFMount v2) CPU with SSE4.2 instruction set (i.e. CPUs released after 2010) Users must have administrator privileges. RAM: 1GB (When mounting large disk images, the more RAM the better) Disk space: 15 MB of free hard disk space for the installation files.
Combining two reliable applications has worked well, even restoring a crashed drive on an ancient laptop that had an IDE drive which none of my current machines accepted. First, I used the Macrium Reflect Recovery boot PE vers 3 for windows XP, booted into the laptop; then, I could access an external hard drive which I backed the entire disk to. Next, I moved that external drive onto a Win 7 machine, again accessed the backup image via Reflect, and converted the image to a .vhd. Next, thru windows Disk Management, I attached the vhd as a mounted drive, edited the boot files, then re-backed that up again with Reflect. Switching back again to the laptop, I booted the usb, this time to restore from the modified backup image onto the laptop drive. Last, I used the fix MBR feature before rebooting, and voila! The laptop was risen from the dead!
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Update July 13, 2012: You can download the VMware Workstation 5.5 Disk Mount Utility here.
Earlier, I blogged about attaching VHD images and WIM files, so it is only fair that I introduce a tool that allows you to mount VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) images. VMware's format is certainly one of the most commonly used imaging formats these days. The VMware DiskMount GUI is not, despite its name, a VMware tool. It is a DEVFRAM product, and simply consists of a graphical user interface for the command line tool VMware DiskMount (vmware-mount.exe), which is a part of the free VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit. As such, you have to first download and install this toolkit before you can use the VMware DiskMount GUI.
It is possible to rip the entire contents of optical media and then mount it with image mounting software. The software installs a virtual optical drive on your PC, which functions exactly the same as a normal drive. But instead of physical media, you feed it image files.
Open the program to get a few more drive options. You can choose to replace your virtual drive icons with that of sheep (virtual sheep), keep a history of your recent disk mounts, auto-mount your last image, show a tray icon, and the eject command unmounts image files. Of these, the history setting offers the most advantage since it makes it easy to swap between recent images. 2ff7e9595c
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