In followup to the previous, I did get Windows 7 installed on the first partition of the physical disk to boot as a VMWare guest from Linux installed on the second partition.
Adding the entire physical disk to the Windws 7 guest VM did not work; it seems that this causes it to appear as an IDE drive to the Windows7 guest, which doesn't work. Whereas if you add just the single partition of the physical disk, it appears as SCSI and can work, once you edit the registry in the guest Windows install, setting ControlSet001\services\LSI_SAS "Start" to REG_DWORD 0 (as documented elsewhere on the web) to prevent Windows BSOD 7B. (I loaded an old XP VM and added the physical Windows 7 partition to it so I could use regedit under XP to make the change).
But using just the windows physical partition in the VM means you can't use the boot loader on the physical disk. So I ended up creating a minimal debian install on a virtual disk, then adding the Win7 physical partition to that VM. The debian installer noticed the Win 7 install and can "multi-boot" to it. In effect I have a 400 MB boot sector (the debian install that exists only for grub), but oh well.
Now I can boot my laptop natively to either Windows 7 or Linux, and also load the other as a VM guest.