VirtualBox is capable of running on multiple platforms and handling different kinds of virtual disk formats, including VMware VMDK files that are used for virtual machines hosted in VMware ...

Programmatically, I'm not sure. But in Windows you can associate a drive letter to a disk number, then out in VMware you can associate a disk number to a VMDK filename.

The base Linux system ext3 filesystem appears to have corrupted the VMware vmdk files, as well as irreparably damaged the OS's filesystem and system files.