The first slice contains the partition information as well as the file table, ... so it will require recovery software that supports the VMs file system.
What I think should help is:
- create a new VM with the same virtual disk size and the same format (2GB Sparse)
- format this new virtual disk the same way as the "lost" one was formatted
- copy and rename the -s001.vmdk from the new VM to the broken VM
- replace each missing or zero bytes slice with a logical empty slice (e.g. using "TFS MACHINE-s025.vmdk" with 327.680 bytes)
Now you should be able to add the virtual disk to another "helper" VM and run the recovery tool for that attached disk.
André