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imac late 2012 with 2 installed drives; main ssd has died/dying, how do i/can i make 2nd 3 tb (hdd) drive main/boot drive and be recognized as such.

I bought a used imac 27" late 2012 which has a 125 gb SSD as main boot drive and a secondary 3 tb hdd that is a data/itunes drive. I have successfully made the hdd a bootable drive running High Sierra. The main boot (ssd) is failing/has failed per disk repair. I want to make the secondary 3 tb hdd the main boot drive and, for all intents and purposes, permanently unmount the sdd. Is this possible. I need to do so so I can use boot camp to make the hdd half mac and half windows (some work programs require windows to run). Is there a way to disable/permanently unmount the ssd so it is not recognized? Cannot use bootcamp as it says the ssd does not have enough room to partition, but it is the hdd i want to partition and install windows on? I've tried everything I know and cannot really find a straight answer. Thank you so much.

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Sep 10, 2023 5:28 PM

Top-ranking reply

Jeff Jay

Level 1

97 points

Posted on Sep 10, 2023 6:06 PM

If the SSD is still alive and recognized, you should be able to boot into the HDD and then use Disk Utility to erase the SSD. This might not make it completely disappear (until it dies), but it should no longer be recognized as a boot drive.

Then, in System Preferences, you will find "Startup Disk," and you can choose the HDD as the Startup Disk, for good.

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imac late 2012 with 2 installed drives; main ssd has died/dying, how do i/can i make 2nd 3 tb (hdd) drive main/boot drive and be recognized as such.

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