I recently committed to using Ubuntu for everything, so I thought I could just run my current development vm's (vmdk files) from my external hard drive as if nothing had really changed.
Problem:
I kept getting a 'File not found' error when I would try to run my virtual machine.
At first, I assumed I had some kind of write permissions missing, or perhaps some NTFS compatibility problem. Since I am pretty new to Linux I first made sure my external HDD was mounted correctly. When I confirmed that, I peeked in the .vmdk file that is referenced by the .vmx file used to configure the machine.

Here’s what I saw...this is a 40gb hard drive split into 2gb files:

# Extent description
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f001." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f002." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f003." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f004." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f005." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f006." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f007." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f008." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f009." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f010." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f011." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f012." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f013." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f014." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f015." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f016." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f017." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f018." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f019." 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f020." 0
RW 10240 FLAT "win2k8Dev1.vmdk-f021." 0

Do you see the “.” at the end of the file name? The file names are not suffixed with a period as the file names in the listing would seem to indicate. After removing the character from the file names I was able to run my machine again.

I am not quite sure what the intent is here for this naming convention...I presume this is some kind delimiter in VMWare’s app. I have gone back and forth between Linux and Windows hosts since removing the offending character and it seems to work swimmingly.

I hope this helps someone.