Delete comment from: Pete's Blog
(Excuse me if I'm submitting this multiple times. At least from here posting using a Google account seems to be broken.)
This way doesn't seem to work very well on Windows 8.1 using VMware Workstation 11 or vmware-mount.exe from the VMware VDDK 5.1.4 (last version to contain vmware-mount). Mounting a disk as admin either way results in only processes launched with elevated privileges being able to see the drive. This isn't very practical since to use it in Explorer you have to pretty much kill off and restart your session with elevated privs.
I did find a workaround. You need a way to start a command prompt as TrustedInstaller, which basically has the highest privileges in an NT6 based system. The easiest way to get this is using the RunAsSystem and RunFromToken utilities from reboot.pro. Use vmware-mount.exe from a TrustedInstaller cmd and the mounted drive will work for all processes, including the lowly unprivileged Explorer you get by default.
Feb 13, 2015, 4:56:35 PM
Posted to How to get a vmdk mapped in Windows Explorer when using VMWare Player 4.x and Windows 7