FYI:
There is a long series of posts here regarding the 0xC1900101 - 0x20017 error so many people are getting when trying the Windows Store Win 8.1 upgrade. I tried the solution that had worked for some people, and edited the vmx file to change the scsi driver to lsisas1068.
This didn't work for me. My system was upgraded from Vista to Win 8 some time ago and had lsilogic as the scsi driver. I changed it to lsisas1068, and tried to boot Win 8. It failed showing the boot screen or a long time, and then a message appears saying Windows cannot start. It tries to fix it, and that fails also. Subsequent attempts to boot sit in a delay state with no action.
I reverted the change to the vmx file. So there must be some other differences between drivers. I'm using a Macbook Retina 2012.
Hope this info is of help to those working the issue.