I mounted one vmdk file in my windows 8 machine and I am able to access all the folders and files except those in "users\ directory. When I try to open, it says I dont have permission. I am not able to give the permission even.
Any one can tell me how to open the users directory? I have very important files in the desktop folder which can be acessed through \users\\desktop.
What is the alternate way of accessing the folder? I lost the password to boot up the vm image.
Although this is an older post, I have a solution: What those who commented above didn't seem to understand is that sometimes a VMDK can be mounted or mapped to using VMWare Workstation only in READ ONLY mode. This usually is due to corruption of the VMDK or could be due to the fact that you have existing snapshots or a suspended virtual machine. Either way, if you mount the disk successfully but it's in read-only mode, you're in trouble because you won't be able to change the NTFS permissions on a users subfolder for those folders for which you have insufficient permissions.
In this case, go to PassMark's website (passmark.com) and download their free OSFMount product (http://osforensics.com/tools/mount-disk-images.html). This software will let you convert your Windows disk image to an ISO. After you have the ISO, you can mount the ISO as a read/write drive image using VMWare Workstation or you can use any other ISO utility to view the files. Just don't burn the ISO image to a read-only CD/DVD/BluRay because you will then have a read-only image and won't be able to modify NTFS permissions, if needed.
I don't work for PassMark but I want to congratulate the company for making such a fine tool available for free. They offer a catalog of other products (some are not free) but they're all of excellent quality.
