The guys over at abinsight.com have released a free GUI wrapper, Vmount, for VMware's command-line tool vmware-mount.exe.  The utility is currently a 1.0 release.

VMware describes the vmware-mount utility in the following way:

“The VMware DiskMount Utility allows you to mount an unused virtual disk in a
Windows host file system as a separate drive without needing to connect to the virtual disk from within a virtual machine. You can mount specific volumes of a virtual disk if the virtual disk is partitioned.” Read more on http://www.vmware.com.

Installation is easy.  Download and run the vmount executable.  The utility uses the Microsoft .NET 2.0 runtime, and the installer will check to see if the prerequisite runtime is already installed.  If not, it will automatically download and install the runtime.  The installation is straight forward.  The only configurable parameter during installation is the install directory.  The setup creates a desktop shortcut to the utility and creates file associations for .vmdk files. 

To run the utility, double click the desktop shortcut.  If the path to vmware-mount.exe is not configured correctly, Vmount will display a warning.  Clicking the warning balloon allows you to specify the full path to vmware-mount.exe. 

A notification icon is placed in the system tray.  Right clicking it will bring up a context menu.  The menu can be used to mount or unmount a virtual disk.  Two configuration settings can also be specified here:

• Full path to the vmware-mount.exe utility: – this setting is self explanatory
• Mount virtual drives starting with: – the utility will use free drive letters starting with the letter specified here. If the drive letter is not available, vmount will try the next one. If all the letters starting from the specified and up to ‘Z’ are already used, the mapping will fail without any error messages.

If you already have .NET 2.0 installed, download this version of Vmount.

If you don't have .NET 2.0 or are unsure, download this version of Vmount.

For more information on the project, go here.

If you have comments, suggestions, or find bugs in the utility, please send them to the author.  They invite your feedback.