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.

Copying VMDK to VDI in VirtualBox. VMware created the Virtual Machine Disk -- VMDK -- format to make it easier to share its virtual machines, or VMs, with products produced and sold by other ...

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.