Booting from CD/DVD inside VMware guest

We are now using CentOS 5.2 in VMware. Last time we tried to boot from CentOS 5.2 DVD (to experiment with its rescue image), it flatly refused. I'm still relatively new to using the VM setups, so it took time to sort it out...

It turned out that there were two issues:

1 - the accessibility of the CD/DVD from the guest
2 - the booting sequence in the guest BIOS

Below are the steps resolving both.

First enable CD/DVD visibility in the guest:
1. Power off the guest OS
2. In "Devices" tab (right-hand side of the screen) select CD/DVD(IDE)
3a. Tick "Connect at power on" and
3b. Mark "Use physical drive"
3c. From the drop-down list select "Auto detect"

Now fix the BIOS boot sequence (in the guest). Notice that you have to change the focus into the guest screen before you can do anything (CTRL-G)
1. Power on guest OS
2. Intercept the boot - hit CTRL-G followed by hit F2 *quickly* - it doesn't hang around for long!
3. In the BIOS menu, identify the boot sequence screen, and change to place CDROM before the hard disk
4. Save and continue boot...