A good acid test, indeed! Thanks, DariusD. I did revisit the issue and I can work with a >2TB disk with the following extents:
RW 2930266584 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive8" 0
RW 2930266584 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive8" 2930266584
This seems to result in an accurate addressing of the disk:
My previous experiment resulted in this, as DariusD suggested;
To get this far, I formatted an actual, physical disk as follows:
As my previous posts indicated, I could not edit or delete partitions when I built a VM using my incorrect extents. Therefore, I could not install Windows in the VM becuase of GPT issues. As I also noted, I must take the physical disk offline in the host, but that's not a big deal. This procedure should also work with a mounted image file. Most bootable >2TB disks (and I haven't seen any yet) will be partitoned with a <2TB partition, so it shouldn't be a problem to boot them in VMware. The issue that I will face is adding a >2TB disk (physical or mounted image) to an existing VM, but I may have a workaround for that, too.