Double-click the volume to explore the contents in a read-only state, allowing you to copy virtual disks or configuration files safely. Best Practices and Safety Warnings
Here is a detailed guide and solution post for .
Regardless of which path you choose, heed these warnings to prevent making a bad situation worse.
Attach the physical drive to your Windows machine (via hot-swap bay, USB-to-SATA/NVMe adapter, or iSCSI initiator). mount vmfs 6 windows hot
Sometimes you can't physically connect the VMFS disk to your Windows machine. The server might be in a remote data center, or you may lack administrative access to the hardware.
: Available on the Microsoft Marketplace , this tool allows you to deep scan and restore data from VMFS partitions directly within Windows.
: Create a new virtual machine in VMware Workstation and install a trial version of ESXi. Double-click the volume to explore the contents in
If you can safely power off your ESXi host or physically remove the disk, you can attach the disk to a Windows machine and use a read-only tool to extract data. This is not “hot” (the volume is offline to VMware), but it’s often safer.
🛑 If you write while ESXi still has the datastore mounted, you will see “heartbeat failure” errors, followed by a purple diagnostic screen (PSOD) on the host.
Are you connecting via (USB/SATA) or network storage (iSCSI/Fibre Channel)? Attach the physical drive to your Windows machine
Connect the VMFS6-formatted storage (e.g., an iSCSI LUN) to your Windows server.
First and foremost, . If you connect a datastore’s physical disk (via SAS, SATA, or NVMe) directly to a Windows Server or workstation, the operating system will see an uninitialized disk or a partition with an unknown file system. It will prompt you to initialize or format the disk — an action that would destroy your VMFS volume.