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.

I transferred the vmdk's to an external HD, and have been taking a look at them. I've tried vmware-vdiskmanager and vmware-mount to either repair or locally mount the filesystem, but nothing was ...

If VMware Workstation has insufficient permission to access the file, grant access to the user, check for File Locks and Conflicting Processes, etc.