Thanks, dariusd. I've found that what doesn't look right just may work perfectly in VMware. My inital objective was to vurtualize an image file mounted as a physical disk. Your point about addressing is well taken, and I will see whether your suggested vmdk and mine can be distinguished from one another. I did try specific sector adressing, but could not produce a usable, >2TB VM/disk. I can tell you that I have had no issues with VMs created from split dd images using the vmdk depicted in the following screen shot. As you can see, the vmdk does not conform technically with vmdk specifications.
I use virtual disks and VMs for specific purposes that may differ from others. If you're interested, please explore my blog at http://justaskweg.com/ I agree that some testing is in order. I could write specific byte values to any given sector on the original disk and see whether the addresses are accessible and accurate in my VM. As I am working with an image file that will not be altered with my approach, it does not matter whether data is lost on my VM. I haven't seen any >2TB disks that contain a Windows operating system, and as I said, an OS was not installed on my 3TB disk. I believe that you can install Windows 7-8 on a GPT disk. If I can find or produce one, I'll see whether I can produce a bootable VM from an image of that disk mounted as a physical disk in the host system. As noted above, I've been able to create a >2TB virtual disk from a dd image file. I then was able to add that vmdk to a Win 7 VM. However, dd image files take up too much space. Hence, I'm experimenting to see whether I can create a virtual disk from an image file mounted as a physical disk, so that I can add that disk to an existing Win 7/8 VM. Perhaps that can't be done, and better yet, perhaps VMware will support >2TB disks before I explore every alternative. Thanks again!