Soft Disabling Imac Internal Hard Drive

Well thanks to the help of this forum I have successfully managed to clone my failing hard drive onto a new usb drive, and am booting OSX from this drive.

The idea is to use the usb drive as my primary drive as I have no desire to open up my mac, due to the complexity in the process (they don't make em easy to break into).

Only problem now is that although the new usb drive works perfectly, the mac is still recognizing the old failing internal drive and trying to mount / boot it. It's therefore making the same clicking noise's, delaying the boot, and throwing an error message when I get into OSX that it can't detect the drive.

The best option for me at this time would be to completely disable it, by software, so I don't need to open the Imac.

I know from experience disabling a hard is very easy to do on a windows based pc, as it can be done in the bios or via device manager, but I have no idea how to do this with an Intel Imac.

My question - is there an easy way of completely disabling the internal hard disk, either by downloading a program that does this, or any other way?

I have tried googling but can't find any good guide, or program to disable hard disk detection on a Mac!!! There must be a way though, I'm sure.

Go to System Preferences/Startup Disk and select the new HDD. That will stop it from trying to boot.

Thanks but I have already done this and the new disk boots perfectly as the primary disk and I can get into OSX fine and do all I need to.

The problem is that on start up the mac also try's to mount or recognize the old internal disk as it would the dvd drive or any another secondary boot device. Since all the problems are still present with this disk, i.e. the clicking, I need a solution to stop it being seen by the imac.

The only solution I can think of, would be to find a way for the failing internal hard disk to be permanently disabled, so it is not visible to the system, but I have no idea how to do this, which is where I'm hoping there will be a software solution or workaround.

italianie said:

Thanks but I have already done this and the new disk boots perfectly as the primary disk and I can get into OSX fine and do all I need to.

The problem is that on start up the mac also try's to mount or recognize the old internal disk as it would the dvd drive or any another secondary boot device. Since all the problems are still present with this disk, i.e. the clicking, I need a solution to stop it being seen by the imac.

The only solution I can think of, would be to find a way for the failing internal hard disk to be permanently disabled, so it is not visible to the system, but I have no idea how to do this, which is where I'm hoping there will be a software solution or workaround.

Click to expand...

Not that I know of. I had the same problem on an old iMac myself. I just got used to the clicking during startup. You would have to physically disable the connection. And as you mentioned, not an easy task on iMac's...

ok thanks, I might have to have a go at opening it again. it finally seems that this is one area that the PC has superior capabilities then a mac. A simple way to soft disable or remove a hard drive would have been nice, but thats the disadvantage of not having a bios.

Any updates on this topic?

Is there a way to disable the internal drive for good on the new iMac without opening it up?

Once booted from the external drive, erase the failing internal drive and leave it blank. With no system to start, the iMac can't try to boot from it.

I don't think his iMac is still trying to boot from the drive since he has already changed the boot disk in the Startup preference pane. I think the Mac is "polling" the system for available drives/hardware. It sees that a drive is there but cannot mount it due to the degree of damage.

Unfortunately I can't think of an easy solution. If Disk Utility cannot mount the drive and repair it enough to correct the problem DiskWarrior 4 - The Disk Utility for Mac Disk Repair, Mac Directory Repair, Mac Disk Recovery, Mac Data Recovery might but that seems a bit expensive if the only goal is to stop the attempted drive access that is going on.

@ OP if you decide this is annoying enough to consider opening the iMac, might be for me, seriously consider purchasing a new internal drive for the iMac and using your existing drive as a backup.

Also, terrible idea to use a USB drive as a boot drive. Beyond slow.