The random crashes, I'm told, are due to excessive scsi bus resets.  I 
haven't debugged it any further since the separate IDE bus solution 
seems to work for me.

--rich

Julian C. Dunn wrote:
> For the list archives.
> 
> A while ago I complained to -help about the fact that I could not
> install NetBSD 1.6.1 as a guest OS under VMWare Workstation 4. After
> reading posts on news.vmware.com I have discovered that the solution is
> to configure the virtual machine to put the virtual IDE disk and virtual
> CD-ROM drive on separate IDE channels, e.g. the virtual IDE drive should
> be on channel 0 target 0 and the CD-ROM should be on channel 1 target 0.
> 
> NetBSD 1.6.1 is now running perfectly under VMWare and I don't get the
> random VMWare crashes that the use of virtual SCSI disks used to cause.
> 
> - Julian
>