How can i remove an internal hard drive that is starting to fail without it causing my reboot to fail
by 
fallsy
ANSWERS: 3
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You can't -- what you need to do is "clone" the drive onto a new disk (before it fails). There are commercial products like DriveCopy (DiskCopy) which allow you to do this. Once you clone the old data onto the new drive, then you put the new drive into the machine and discard the old drive. If you have anything important on the old drive, keep it for a while, then when you're satisfied the new drive is OK, destroy the old one violently so nobody can scrape data off of it. A heavy hammer works well for this part, and its fun!
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Use another computer to clone the drive and replace. Though ideally you are best using the opportunity to do a fresh restart. Back up and get another copy of your OS to restore to the new drive.
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It is best, when possible, to use another working computer when duplicating a hard drive, because small errors on the old drive might cause the copy to fail. Either way, get a new hard drive and use copying software, such as also suggested here to "clone" (duplicate" the drive exactly. The new hard drive need not be the exact same capacity or model. I use Acronis, which will resize the old hard drive partition to fit the new drive, either larger or smaller.
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