I encountered this bug when running VMWare Server 1.0.3 on CentOS (4 or 5, I think). The guest OS was a fresh Debian Etch AMD64 system (using 2.6.18) which I dist-upgraded to Lenny (using 2.6.22). The 2.6.22 kernel could not detect the SCSI drive, with the same diagnostics as reported by OP. The 2.6.18 kernel booted fine. Upgrading VMWare Server to 1.0.4 resulted in 2.6.22 booting correctly.