How to restore Ubuntu server on a VMWare image after disk failure?

After a disk failure on a VMWare GSX I was able to start the raid with one disk and copy the VMWare image to my ESXi server. After repairing the image with

vmkfstools -x repair /vmfs/volumes/source/vmname/vmname.vmdk

and converting it to ESXi with

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/source/vmname/vmname.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/dest/vmname/vmname.vmdk -d thin

I am not able to boot the image an just get

GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
_

and the cursor does not even blink.

What are my options now? Is it possible to recover somehow with a rescue CD? What are the steps?

UPDATE:

I followed the advice to create a new Ubuntu server and add the VMWare image as new disk. However I get the following.

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
 missing codepage or helper program, or other error
 In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
 dmesg | tail or so

I was trying to restore the superblock but had no luck with the following commands.

sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdb

The above printed several numbers (as described in http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/repair-a-broken-ext4-superblock-in-ubuntu/).

e2fsck -b 20480000 /dev/sdb

I just keep getting “The superblock could not be read…”. Do I have any chance to get the data on this ext3 file system back?