If you don't want to pay for software and have a spare machine (or can boot from a USB stick on your Windows hardware), this is the most robust method. Since Windows can't read VMFS, we bypass Windows entirely.
You can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) to mount the physical drive and use Linux-native vmfs6-tools to read the data. mount vmfs 6 windows hot
If you don't want to purchase expensive recovery software, you can use a Linux VM or Live CD as a middleman: Linux has an open-source driver called vmfs6-tool . If you don't want to pay for software
: Install the software, connect the physical drive or iSCSI target, and use the "Mount" feature to assign a Windows drive letter to the VMFS partition. If you don't want to purchase expensive recovery
Open VMFS or specific forks like vmfs6-tools wrapped in a UI. However, for Windows users, the easiest interface is often a tool like Veaam File Manager (for older VMFS) or a compiled binary of vmfs-tools .