I have Windows XP in an orderly VM and want yo access it from Windows 7 but every time I start it the XP requests connection to a Microsoft Registration Server - a thing that I cannot do from my computer.
Question : how can I access the file system in the VM without activating it
If you want to access the VM's files without powering on the VM and if you're using VMware Workstation (Pro) on a Windows host, you can choose File > Map Virtual Disks, click the Map button and select the .vmdk file for your Windows XP VM.
If you're on Windows but don't have VMware Workstation (Pro), you should be able to use the vmware-mount command-line tool from the Virtual Disk Development Kit.
.vmdk files either because you took snapshots or because the virtual disk is split across separate files. The .vmdk file you should use is the one reported when you open the VM and look at the Hard Disk properties.
Commented
Jul 25, 2019 at 0:10
Make a new Windows VM that you can properly license. Even a trial license is good if you just want to copy the files off and put them somewhere else. After you have your new VM up and running, power it off, and then add a disk to it. When you go through the wizard, don't choose new disk, but instead choose to add an already existing disk. Then navigate to the file that contains the disk for your XP machine. When you boot up again, you should see the XP disk as a second drive (probably D: or E:).
If your VM is created using VMware. VMware Workstation (not just Player) allows you to mount the image natively as a drive on Windows. Just right-click the image file icon to do so. If you don't have VMware Workstation, you can still use archiving software that support the VMDK format to view or copy out files in read-only mode. For example, 7-Zip supports reading a single VMDK file with NTFS file systems inside (note that it doesn't support split VMDK files yet).
