Thanks Ulli for your time,

What is Photorec? Will I need to get the computer back to use it or can I use it on the recovered files with extensions .vmdk?

We only extracted those 2 files because all I needed from the machine was my Quicken file. I was using it solely for my accounting. Those two files were the most promising because they were large - most of the other files were too small to be a Quicken data file"

Do you also find a small text-vmdk with same name just without the "-s00*" ?
Do you have readable vmware.log files ?

Not that I know of (small text file or readable vmeare.log files). What would I do if I found them? I am unfortunately not a tech person, so I will need to go back to VMware to ask them to help me with it.

I'm basically looking for a way to open those 2 .vmdk files using VMware Fusion 10 (need to reload it onto my mac) without having to purchase VMware Fusion 12 just to open them, as they might not even be the files I need.