Workstation has multiple .vmdk files, cannot clone or convert.

[CntrlsGuy104]

Hi, I'm running Windows 10 Guest OS inside a VM where host is Windows 10. 

Host has 2 Drives:

C: with 200+ GB Free of 450GB. 
😧 with 0MB Free of 478GB. 

The ONLY thing in the 😧 Drive is VMWare files. The VMWare Workstation 16.2 sometimes doesn't have enough space to start the image. When I managed to get the Guest OS to run, I cleaned up files, did a defrag etc. Guest windows reports that only 130GB of the 300GB hard drive is used. When i look in Workstation, It reports Current size is 57.1GB and maximum for the NOT preallocated disk is 300GB.

There are multiple vmdk files:

Windows 10 x64.vmdk - 138GB
Windows 10 x64-000001.vmdk - 0.3GB
Windows 10 x64-000002.vmdk - 145GB
Windows 10 x64-000003.vmdk - 100GB
Windows 10 x64-000004.vmdk - 59GB

There were snapshots, but in my effort to resolve this I have removed them from the VMWare. No vmdk files were removed when i deleted the snapshots. 

I have tried cloning the image to the C drive: it fails with not enough disk space. 

I have tried using command 
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe" -r "D:\Virtual Machines\Windows 10 x64\Windows 10 x64-000004.vmdk" -t 0 "C:\VMWare\Windows10.vmdk"
This command always fails at 3% with "unknown error". 

I have tried removing each vmdk file, when attempting to start the guest OS, it always says each file is required. 

I have read posts indicating to move ALL the vmdk's to another drive, but i do not currently have a large enough external drive to store all of these files. (nearly 500GB). 

I just want 1 single vmdk file that is 'about' the size of the windows data (130GB). I don't want these multiple vmdk's taking up all this space. 

I do not know how to fix it and have been searching for solutions for 2 days. I hope someone can help!

[RDPetruska]

You need free disk space on your host in order to perform ANY vmdk utility maintenance.  Since your virtual disk is a single growable (monolithic-sparse) type, then in order to do ANY vmdk utilities, you MUST have at least the max defined size of the virtual disk space free (i.e. 300 GB) plus some overhead. 

First off, do yourself a huge favor and change the type to split disk - then you will 1) only need as much free space as one slice (2 GB) plus some overhead, and 2) be MUCH more resistant to disk errors - and be able easier to recover data if anything does happen to the virtual disk file(s).

Although, I believe, before you can convert the disk type, you will need to delete/merge the snapshots.  Again, all of these operations will require having at least 300GB + overhead (say perhaps 20-25GB).  You may need to move these files off to a separate hard disk first, in order to do them.