combining cores into a collection

[David Santamauro]

Hi,
I have a few cores on the same machine that share the schema.xml and 
solrconfig.xml from an earlier setup. Basically from the older 
distribution method of using
  shards=localhost:1234/core1,localhost:1234/core2[,etc]
for searching.

They are unique sets of documents, i.e., no overlap of uniqueId between 
cores and they were indexed with SOLR 4.1.

Is there a way to combine those cores into a collection, maybe through 
the collections API? They are loaded with a lot of data so avoiding a 
reload is of the utmost importance.

thanks,

David