I transferred the vmdk's to an external HD, and have been taking a look at them. I've tried vmware-vdiskmanager and vmware-mount to either repair or locally mount the filesystem, but nothing was ...

The boilerplate answer is to shrink the VMDK... but these Linux VMs use an ext4 filesystem, which VMware does not support shrinking with their conventional tools (i.e. vmware-toolbox).