Why does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on vmware hypervisor boot process stuck at grub prompt post reboot?

Issue

• New kernel installed and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 system was rebooted.
• It's stuck at grub> prompt and not able to find root partition in rescue mode at all.

[root@rescue mode ~]# grub
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.


    GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename.]
grub> root (hd0,0)
root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x8e
grub>