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I see this question pop up a lot: "I have an old ESXi hard drive plugged into my Windows PC via USB, but it asks me to format it. How do I mount VMFS on Windows?"
If you are just trying to mount a VMDK file (and not the whole datastore), use VMware Workstation or vmware-mount.exe utility instead. It’s much faster for single files.
sudo exportfs -a sudo systemctl restart nfs-server mount vmfs windows
Modern VMFS versions (especially VMFS 6) are complex. Specialized tools like or Hetman Partition Recovery are the most reliable way to read these partitions in Windows. ✅ Pros: Supports VMFS 5/6, handles RAID, easy interface.
VMFS is a high-performance file system designed for VMware ESXi hosts. It is not natively readable by Windows. Attempting to access a VMFS drive via Windows Disk Management will result in a prompt to "Initialize Disk," which will erase the datastore. This guide covers the safe method to mount VMFS on Windows for data recovery. I see this question pop up a lot:
# Install VMFS tools sudo apt update sudo apt install vmfs-tools
Here is a quick rundown on how to do this without losing your data. sudo exportfs -a sudo systemctl restart nfs-server Modern
🛑 Most Windows methods only provide read-only access. Do not attempt to write to VMFS from Windows, as it can cause permanent data corruption.