Splitting the Fusion Drive
I have a late-2013 iMac 27" 3.5GHz quad-core, running Catalina. A test of the fusion drive has determined the SSD is failing. I created a bootable external SSD which is running this computer right now. It works great but the internal drive(s) still show up on the desktop. If the icon is clicked, or if anything activates the disk, the entire computer crashes and restarts. The old system is still bootable, despite the corrupted drive. It takes about 30 minutes to boot and any click or drags when it's open means a least a couple of minutes of spinning beach ball before anything happens. I'd like to decouple the drives and find a way to reuse the HDD while also keeping the failing SSD from populating the desktop. Is there a way to do this without opening it up?
Thank you!
iMac 27″, OS X 10.10