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Question
Monday, April 1, 2013 6:17 PM
Hi Guys,
On the same physical disk, I have 2 partitions and I created 1 VHD file on each of them; On the 1st partition, this is a 40GB vhd file, and on the 2nd partition, this is a 80GB vhd. I attached them, then they appear as 2 disks in diskmgmt.msc
I would like to know if it would be possible to merge these 2 disks into 1 disk of 120 GB ?
Thanks.
All replies (6)
Monday, April 1, 2013 6:23 PM ✅Answered | 2 votes
No difference here than if you were asking the question about two physical disks. Yes, you can merge them, but it will require some sort of a utility (robocopy) to copy the data from each of the smaller disks to a larger disk.
.:|:.:|:. tim
Monday, April 1, 2013 6:39 PM ✅Answered | 2 votes
Only Differencing virtual disks can be merged into their respective parent.
If one disk is not a differencing disk of the other, then there is no "merge" - only a copy of the data as Tim describes.
Beyond that I am not totally clear on your objective, especially since you mention running out of space.
Brian Ehlert
http://ITProctology.blogspot.com
Learn. Apply. Repeat.
Disclaimer: Attempting change is of your own free will.
Monday, April 1, 2013 6:32 PM
Thanks Tim. Actually I want to keep the 2 vhd files separated because I am basically running out of space on my physical drive. Then, I don't want to transfer any data, but maybe I missed something on your explanations.
Monday, April 1, 2013 8:26 PM
Hi Guys,
On the same physical disk, I have 2 partitions and I created 1 VHD file on each of them; On the 1st partition, this is a 40GB vhd file, and on the 2nd partition, this is a 80GB vhd. I attached them, then they appear as 2 disks in diskmgmt.msc
I would like to know if it would be possible to merge these 2 disks into 1 disk of 120 GB ?
Thanks.
Create third drive, mount all 3 using vhdmount, see this:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708295(v=ws.10).aspx
and copy all the content from two sources to one destination. As Tim told robocopy is preferred as it will preserve attributes. See this:
However you need to understand you need to install Windows on destination BEFORE or your resulting VHD(x) is not going to be bootable.
Good luck!
Monday, April 1, 2013 10:52 PM
Hi
Its not possible on the host server to merge two .vhd files into a single vhd file. However what you can do is to merge the two within the VM and to the VM, it would appear as single disk of 120 GB. For this, inside the VM, convert each disk into a dynamic disk and then create spanned volume using those. However, it will result in loss of data. So you'll have to take backup before doing it.
Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Monday, April 1, 2013 10:54 PM
Of course, creating a spanned disk will delete all the information that currently resides on the two disks. I get the sense from the original post that he wants to preserve the data.
.:|:.:|:. tim