i tried all the above. and could never get past no bootcamp found. So i ended up manually creating bootcamp vmdks ... totally a pain but it worked:
I created regular VMDK-based VM - then to make it a bootcamp VM, I replace the virtual disk (original VMDK) with the physical disk :
my C drive is the 4th partition on the main HD, so i used this to create a vmdk that is really bootcamp partition.
this command will create the bootcamp VMDK.
/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 4 "Disk1" lsisas
this is what my vmx looks like (last 3 lines)
$ cat W7x64.vmx|grep scsi
scsi0.pciSlotNumber = "160"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.sasWWID = "50 05 05 62 0e f2 cb b0"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068"
scsi0:0.fileName = "Disk1.vmdk"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.redo = ""
not elegant ... but it works now.