Run Virtual Machine (VMWare) as a standalone system

The instructions are really incredibly simple:

Taken from https://www.petri.co.il/use-iso-image-files-vmware.htm:

To mount an ISO file in VMware Workstation or Server, go to your existing Virtual Machine. Double-click on the CD-ROM drive like this:

Or, inside VMware, go to VM -> Settings and click on CD/DVD drive. Here, you will seen the "Connection" properties for this device. By default, you are probably using the "physical driver". To change that and use a disk image, click on Use ISO Image, like this:
_{(source: petri.co.il)}

Click Browse, browse to the name of your .ISO file, and click Open.

This will fill in the path to your ISO file, like this:

Now, click Connect at power on and OK.

At this point the ISO is ready for use by the OS. This demonstration was done with the VM not running but this operation can be performed on VMs while they are running (just like you would taking a CD/DVD in and out of the CD/DVD drive on your PC).

Here, you can see that the mounting was successful:

As you can see, this Windows Server has a CD drive mounted, even though it has no physical CD/DVD drive. From here, I could install operating system upgrades or additional features.

To use a physical disc instead of an ISO, check the option for "Use physical drive".

What I've done before is to create the VM and a blank disk but boot from a recovery Linux ISO (eg SystemRescueCd), mount the VMware disk, add the network details then attach the physical drive to a Linux box and use dd over ssh to transfer the entire drive contents to the VM disk.

Once it's all copied let the VM boot from it.

For recovering what was a running system this has worked fine. The only problem may be with having the drivers for the type of drive that the VM now has.