Hey, as of typing these lines i´m currently booting a ~240gb vmdk image from synology nas (samba) which is split into multiple 2gb files. I can do that because it´s taking: a) ages to load b) even longer to modify the settings while it´s not running i assume that one of the problems is that it´s split into multiple files (that was the only setting vmware offered me while creating a vm out of this box). so what i´m wondering is: is there any way to merge them back into a big one? or would that be senseless anyway? would be very thankful for any kind of support.
It could be many reasons but yes I think the split doesn't help. You could make a new vhd in diskmgmt.msc, make the various partitions manually and copy over all the data, partition by partition Or you could possibly use one of those vmware disk converter things... I've never been able to get one of those to work, but that's mostly because the web is crawling with outdated software and utilities and I'm on win8.1 You could map the drive to your system in the utilities dropdown in vm settings to fish out any important data. You can add the vhd to vmware, but you have to unselect their default vmdk drive finding option.
Thanks for your fast answer. I gave all of that a try - non of them either worked as it should or at all. While i was cleaning up the mess on my PC i noticed that i still had VMware Vcenter Converter Standalone from a previous VMware install (V9). That one finally did the job - not by converting - but by creating a new VM but as one big file.