parkernathan wrote: OK so you need me to boot into Windows and show you what's going on when I attempt to install Windows?
In you OP you state, "I'm trying to install Windows 7 in a VM ... . However, when I get to the portion of the screen to select the drive to install Windows on, the list of drives are blank." and based on the .vmx and .log files things are as they should be and Windows 7 should have no problem seeing the virtual hard disk. So at this point I'm at a loss except to see exactly what it is you were looking at, as the saying goes a picture worth a thousand words... 
In doing so it might help to further diagnose the issue.