You can certainly do it and I have on multiple occassions with varying degrees of pain using information I cobbled together from the following sites:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/95323
Here is my quick and dirty method: (If you're using Workstation or Server, then skip steps 3,4 and 6-9 aka the hard part)
1) Clone the entire disk (with boot sector) using Acronis (I use version 9.1, but newer should work)
If this doesn't work, you can try another cloning tool OR...
UPDATE: Use the instructions here: (All it requires is connectivity between the machines and a couple of a pair of Knoppix CD (or other live distrros)
slave% nc -l -p 9000 | dd of=/dev/sda (Replace /dev/sda with actual drive on your slave machine)
master% dd if=/dev/sda | nc 192.168.0.254 9000 (replace IP address with the IP address of the slave)
This process pipes dd read data over a netcat connection and and receiver reads that port and writes it to destination drive. (In my case, I had to use /dev/sdb on the source machine and /dev/sda on the destination.)
2) Create a VM with OS type "Other 32-bit" using Buslogic for SCSI
3) Download the Buslogic driver from:
4) Resize the image to 720K (required or it won't read on ESX/ESXi) using dd
dd if=blc_3.05.1.btld.img of=blc_3.05.1-vmw1.btld.img bs=720k count=1
(dd for Windows available at: )
5) Clone the disk image to the VM (you'll need to upload and mount an ISO for whatever disk you used to make the image and the floppy if using ESX/ESXi)
6) Boot the VM and at the Boot: prompt and find the floppy drive by typing "dir fd()" and "dir fd(64)". If you see files pop up, you've got the right one.
7) Run the following command (this is where I break with most of the instructions out there):
unix.install link=fd()blc Sdsk=blc(0,0,0,0) root=hd(42) dump=hd(41) swap=hd(41)
or
unix.install link=fd(64)blc Sdsk=blc(0,0,0,0) root=hd(42) dump=hd(41) swap=hd(41)
8) Login in SINGLE USER MODE using CTRL-D and enter your root PW and run the following:
vi /etc/conf/cf.d/mscsi and add a line that says:
blc Sdsk 0 0 0 0
(Comment out any other lines that don't start with "wd" and save)
mount -r /dev/fd0 /mnt
btldinstall /mnt
(answer yes to everything, including rebuilding the kernel)
vi /etc/default/boot (change the boot string line to read and save:)
DEFBOOTSTR=hd(40)unix swap=hd(41) dump=hd(41) root=hd(42) disable=usb_uhci,usb_ohci,usb_ehci
9) Reboot the system
10) Login and follow the instructions for changing / cleaning up the NIC configuration:
At that point, you should be all set. If you are able to load the driver but you stil can't boot due to an error 22, then your partitions are probably whacked and you need to try another method to image it. I have had this happen once. It is also recommended that you clean up any tape drives, cron jobs for hte backups, etc. But compared to getting the Buslink driver to work, that's a piece of cake.
If you decide to follow the other instructions in the links at the top of the page, you will almost certainly run out of memory trying to boot using the defbootstr method instead of the unix.install method. (You're welcome to waste your time trying, however.) 
Sorry for the rather disorganized presention of the data. I need to work up a full version of this and put it elsewhere.
Regardless, good luck and let me know if that works for you.