This article outlines steps for connecting and using a USB external hard drive inside your VMware Workstation virtual machine. If you want to use an internal hard drive from another computer, you need an enclosure for it that has a USB connector.
Note: Please consult the documentation for your version of Linux for other distribution and version-specific instructions, as well as for instructions on manually mounting USB hard drives using the terminal.
On Windows, you can also connect an external hard drive by right-clicking on the external hard drive icon in the bottom right corner of the Workstation window.