Before diving into the "how," let's look at the "why":
If you manage VMware infrastructure, you are familiar with . It is the proprietary, high-performance cluster file system used by VMware vSphere and ESXi to store virtual machines. windows read vmfs partition
If you don't need the whole partition but just want to read files inside a specific Virtual Machine disk (a .vmdk file), do not mount the partition. Instead, mount the file. Before diving into the "how," let's look at
Boot your Windows machine from a USB drive running a specialized forensic OS like or PALADIN . These include VMFS support out-of-the-box. Before diving into the "how
Since Windows does not natively support VMFS, the most robust "free" method is to bypass Windows temporarily.