VMWare-Mount not recognizing virtual disks

Question

I have two disks as .vmdk files, and four as .vdi files. I can boot virtual machines on them with Sun xMV VirtualBox, and they work just fine. However, I want to mount them on my local computer so I can read some files off of them without starting a virtual machine. I downloaded the vmware-mount utility, but I get this error:

Unable to mount the virtual disk. The disk may be in use by a virtual
machine, may not have enough volumes or mounted under another drive
letter. If not, verify that the file is a valid virtual disk file.

Thinking it's a problem with the utility, I downloaded the SDK and made my own simple program in C to try to mount a disk. It just initializes the API, connects to it, then attempts to open the disk. I get this error, once again claiming it is not a virtual disk:

**LOG: DISKLIB-DSCPTR: descriptor above max size: I64u
**LOG: DISKLIB-LINK  : "f:\programming\VMs\windowstrash.vdi" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk).
**LOG: DISKLIB-CHAIN : "f:\programming\VMs\windowstrash.vdi" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk).
**LOG: DISKLIB-LIB   : Failed to open 'f:\programming\VMs\windowstrash.vdi' with flags 0x1e (The file specified is not a virtual disk).
** FAILURE ** : The file specified is not a virtual disk

The files are clearly virtual disks, though, since I can actually mount and use them with a virtual machine. I tried detaching them from any VMs and trying again, but I got the same results.

Any ideas? Maybe the "descriptor above max size" is a hint?

Answer 1

.vdi is a VirtualBox supported format, but not supported by VMWare.

The .vmdk files are VMWare images - you should be able to load them fine using the vmware tool (VirtualBox supports these too, but the converse is not true).