Have you tried steps mentioned in KB VMware KB: Cannot connect to the client CD/DVD drive by using Passthrough IDE mode
How to Video Booting VMWare Virtual Machine From Client CD Rom - YouTube
Many times when I go to stop the VM, the lame thing says I can't because no VMTools are installed? I may be mistaken, but I thought you can ONLY installed the tools into the VM's client OS ONCE you get the dang client OS installed, which I am struggling with right? If this isn't true, please let me know as well, because from everything I have read so far, that looks to be the case, so why is it kicking back the error?
To answer the above problem , the power operations which your trying is used to perform soft OS shutdown, reboot which require OS & VMware tools, but you can still perform PowerOff & Reset operation without VMware tools which are Hard Shutdown and Reboot.