This paper presents a heuristic approach to accelerate the reconfiguration of two-dimensional degradable VLSI arrays linked by 4-port switches in presence of faulty processing elements (PEs). In particular, we proposed a technique to preprocess the host array by 1) identifying fault-free PEs that cannot form the target array due to their proximity to faulty PEs, and 2) labeling these fault-free PEs as faults. The proposed preprocessing method minimizes the number of PEs that will be considered for reconfiguration, thus accelerating the reconfiguration process. Simulation results show that the runtime of two well-known algorithms are significantly reduced by employing the preprocessing technique. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of the proposed technique by showing that the runtime reduction rate increases with increasing fault density.