Some more information here...
I was able to use a Linux rescue disk to boot on the VM and see the drive. This disk has LVM, and if I try to boot it on its own, I get "operating system not found", which seems to indicate to me that it is never getting to GRUB.
I tried removing the virtual disk from the VM and chose to keep the vmdk file, then added a new disk and pointed to this same vmdk file, with no change.
If I just try to do grub-install /dev/sda, I get "/dev/sda does not have any corresponding BIOS drive".
I have attached the output of fdisk -l - forgive the screen caps, I am not able to capture text from the VMWare console window. Not sure what to try next. Thanks.