Mac OS Mojave VM with corrupt hdd file?

When I try to boot the Mojave VM it just boots to the prohibitive symbol and then to the recovery partition. When I try to mount the hdd file inside the VM file, a volume mounts, but it just contains a folder named EFI with no user data inside. Is there any way I can repair the hdd file so that I can retrieve the latest files in the user folder? It has been a while since the files were backed up to an external drive, and I would love not to have to recreate the work.

 

Update:
I just mounted the hdd file from a working Mojave VM and a volume mounts with only the same EFI folder (screenshot attached) as in the non-booting VM. Is there a way to mount a Mac Virtual Machine hdd file so that I can look at the user data to hopefully recover some files?