VMware guest install from CD-ROM hangs

Today I wanted to install Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES10) from my USB DVD drive on my VMware Server (the free edition). I went though the wizard and powered on the machine but when the SUSE installer started to read the initial ramdisk it never got any further.

Troubleshooting VMware issues… First I seached Google but didn’t really found anything usefull. My problem was to generic. Then I found that each VMware machine has its own log file at the same location as the vmx files etc. I found that when the machine stopped responding the log file would say something like this:

Jan 19 12:04:22: vcpu-0| VIDE: (0x170) Rep INSW ATAPI Unknown Cmd 0x52 Data len 8
Jan 19 12:04:22: vcpu-0| VIDE: (0x170) Rep INSW ATAPI Unknown Cmd 0x52 Data len 28
Jan 19 12:04:22: vmx| CDROM_SG: AIOCallbackSGIO: Unexpected errno: Input/output error (5)
Jan 19 12:04:22: vmx| VIDE: ATAPI DMA 0x28 Failed: key 0x2, asc 0x0, ascq 0x0

Okay now this seems to be a CD/DVD drive problem. I found another working version of SLES 10 on VMware and compared the 2 vmx files.

diff working.vmx not_working.vmx
...
11,12c10,11
< ide1:0.fileName = "/dev/cdrom"
 ide1:0.fileName = "/dev/scd0"
> ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

Now shut down the virtual machine and edited the vmx fil to use atapi-cdrom and now I was able to install.