[ubuntu] Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64bit guest OS kernel panic on start up

Hi,

I have a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64bit guest OS running on VMWare Workstation 12 Player on a Windows 10 host. I was running Eclipse for a while recently when it got really slow despite multiple Eclipse restarts, so I decided to reboot the guest OS. It froze on the GUI desktop either shutting down or booting up, so I rebooted down using VMWare. After this, I kept getting kernel panics with the following errors:

run-init: /sbin/init: No such file or directory
Target filesyste doesn't have requested /sbin/init
run-init: /sbin/init: No such file or directory
run-init: /etc/init Permission denied
run-init: /bin/init: No such file or directory

I think my filesystem must have been corrupted somehow. How do I fix this problem?

Edit:

I tried to boot into a Live DVD by loading the 14.04 DVD ISO as the DVD drive and checking "Connect at power on". I then started the VM and selected the DVD drive in the boot menu. However, it still booted up from my hard drive. Interestingly, there's a + sign next to the hard drive and not next to the DVD drive. Does that mean anything?