There are many virtual machine software available for Windows hosts. Most popular of these is definitely VMware Player and VMware Workstation. There is also open-source Virtual Box but it does not officially support macOS as guest operating system.
When you are using VMware Player, it saves the virtual machine drives as VMDK files. These files might get damaged and become corrupted because of file system failure. When a VMDK has become corrupt, it is unable to load the operating system from it.
In order to repair such corrupt and damaged VMDK files, we can use a software called SysTools VMware Recovery. This one software contains tools to repair the damaged VMDK files, restore its file system structure and we can also extract files from inside it.
For using this software, we do not need any VMware software installed on our Windows PC. It works completely independently of VMware Player.
After launching SysTools VMware Recovery, we can open the folder where the VMDK files are located. It can scan all of the VMDK files and show you a list of virtual hard drives found inside them. We can then double-click on any of these virtual drives to open and view their file system structure.
The detected file system is displayed in form of a tree view on the left side of the window. We can expand these folders to find any files present inside them. After making a selection of the files to be exported, we can choose to export them to any folder of our choice. For some file types such as images, it also allows a preview before actually exporting them to another drive.
In the demo version of SysTools VMware Recovery, we cannot extract the files. But we can preview the data that it finds on the selected VMDK file.
You can download SysTools VMware Recovery from https://www.systoolsgroup.com/vmware-recovery.html.