Guest OS boots reliably in WS 7.1.5, not WS8

[edwardsereed]

I've spent about 4 days trying to diagnose the behavior I'm seeing.  I've learned a few things others might benefit from knowing.  But I still have a distinct behavior difference between WS 7.1.5 and WS 8 (which is consistent with Player 3.1.5 and Player 4.0).

Environment:

Host processor:  AMD-64 processor

Host OS:  OpenSuSE 11.3 64-bit, as well as OpenSuSE 12.1 64-bit

Guest OS: UnixWare 7.1.4 SP3 running as "other" os type with installed HBA (updated IDE driver) on VMWS 6.5-7.1.5 format guest VM

Failure description:  Guest OS boot loader intermittently fails to boot OS - leaving console in bootloader, which is SOMETIMES able to boot OS if manually enter "boot unix", but not always (failure rate is about 2 or 3 times success rate).  Guest OS normal boot similarly succeeds about 1/3 of the time.

What works:

UnixWare 7.1.4 (single cpu, single 8GB IDE disk) in WS 7.1.5 or Player 3.1.5 64-bit version on the OpenSuSE 11.3 or 12.1 64-bit host OS

What doesn't work reliably:

UnixWare 7.1.4 (single cpu, single 8GB IDE disk) in WS 8.0.2 or Player 4.0 64-bit versions with VM guest still in 6.5-7.1.5 compatibility version on the OpenSuSe 11.3 or 12.1 64-bit host OS

The problem "feels" like the WS 8.0.2 virtual drivers SOMETIMES fail to work for the guest os, perhaps with some unitialized data problem.

Install of VM Workstation and Player onto Host OS proceeds normally - no issues.

Install of Guest OS into Guest VM proceeds normally on WS 7.1.5, but intermittently fails on WS 8.0 at the point where the guest OS installer tries to read the CDROM drive to import host bus adapter drivers.

Note on 32-bit OS on 64-bit processor:

I've also tried WS 8.0.2 and Player 4.0 32-bit versions on the OpenSuSE 11.3 and 12.1 32-bit host OS (same intermitent behavior).

I've concluded that the 32-bit VMware products don't work well on a 32-bit host OS running on a 64-bit processor - but frankly haven't exhausted that failure mode tree for certain.

I'm sorry about the speculation - but it sure feels like the WS and Player software know they're on 64-bit hardware and use that, instead of the OS version to decide how to behave - they have the same problem.

But even with the Guest OS being 64-bit on the 64-bit processor, only the WS 7.1.5 and Player 3.1.5 reliably let the guest OS bootloader find the IDE hard disk to boot the OS.

I've tried turning on CDROM Legacy Emulation, to no avail.

I've tried telling the guest OS that the IDE Hard Drive is "Independent", to no avail.

Yes, when it works, WS8 appears faster - but it doesn't work often enought to support its use.

So - I'm seeking information about how to make WS8 or Player 4 reliably and consistently present virtual IDE interface to a 6.5-7.1 Guest VM, like WS 7.1.5 does.