I figured this out on my own.

The reason the screen is blank could be due to Display settings unsupported by the BIOS or grub.  I dumb downed my display settings, and now I can see the bios and grub boot.  Grub is failing to read the (hd0) partition table.  I'll be digging into this next, though not a vmware issue at this point.  At least I can now boot off a CDROM and use gparted to see the partition table is recoverable.   I just need to figure out how to get grub to see it.