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Consolidating Multiple Virtual Drives Into One

VMware does not provide special software tools to consolidate the contents of multiple drives into a single drive.

To consolidate the contents of multiple drives, operating systems must be persuaded that software installed on these drives (such as C:, D:, E:) must be moved to one drive (such as C:) and that all files with stored paths to other drives (such as D: and E:) have to be changed to the first drive.

However, if you have data files on two of the three virtual disks (where the files could be safely moved), then it is possible (as with a standard PC) to use the standard backup software provided with the guest operating system to:

  1. Backup the boot/system drive.
  2. Create a large virtual disk for the virtual machine.
  3. Install a fresh copy of the guest operating system into the virtual machine.
  4. Use the guest operating system's included software to restore the original 2GB boot/system drive image on top of the large virtual disk.
  5. Copy the data files from the two 2GB drives into the single large drive.

Note: Quite a bit of time is required to perform the above steps, so VMware does not recommend this procedure in general.

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