I put ESXi on an old server, but the hardware died. The hard drive is fine, and I'd like to get the VMs I made on that server moved over to a new server. The problem is, the old server used IDE drives and the new server only has SATA controllers. I have an IDE/USB adapter, but ESXi does not seem to support mounting of a USB storage devices.
Is there any way I can get access to the datastore on old hard drive? I have a Windows machine with VMware Workstation if that can be used in any way.
UPDATE: I created a VM on Workstation and installed ESXi. I then created a virtual hard drive a little bigger than the IDE hard drive. I hooked up the USB hard drive, booted up the VM, connected it to the guest, loaded a GParted Live CD ISO, and copied the drive with dd as suggested by josephkern. I tried GParted first, but it couldn't see the partitions. My first attempt failed because I created a SCSI virtual drive instead of an IDE virtual drive. ESXi saw the partition but gave an invalid path error when trying to browse it. After I created an IDE virtual drive, used dd, and booted back to ESXi, I added it as a Disk in vSphere Client and as was able to browse the datastore. Yay!