Finally a solution to mounting your evidence in Linux to avoid all that manual labor and steep learning curve for something that should be much simpler.

VMDK's, EWF's, and Virtualbox VHD's are containers around partitions. VMDK's often are stream-optimized and need to be converted before processing. A mounted image can contain any of a number of Windows or Linux filesystems. They also could contain an LVM partition that once mounted need additional parsing to mount the various logical volumes.

This requires the installation of per-image libraries. For the support of all images, it requires libewf-tools, libvmdk, losetup, and libvhdi (compiled from https://github.com/libyal/libvhdi/releases). If your VMDK needs to be converted to a compatible format, you will need to install VMware-vix-disklib that contains vmware-vdiskmanager.

Run this with the expected DEVICE and optional MOUNTPOINT and sit back.

evmount [-u] <DEVICE_OR_FILE> [MOUNT_POINT]

Unmounting is not automatic. The complexity there is a future addition.

Happy Hunting!