Removing hard drive from windows 10

So I just installed windows 10 on one out of two of my hard drives. I tried to remove my other hard drive(for storing my backups) but windows stopped booting. When I plugged the backup drive back in, windows was able to boot again. I would like to remove that backup drive and replace it with an ssd that has linux mint installed. Is there a way to do this?

Windows likes to install crap to every hard drive that is present during installation. The easiest way to avoid it is to unplug all hard drives that you do not want Windows on and then install Windows.

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It's too late now...I figured that out a bit too late. Now, I don't have enough time to reinstall everything. Right now, I'm just physically swapping the sata and power cable between my backup drive and my ssd which is not a satisfactory solution. my backup drive is now a slave to my windows drive. I haven't used windows for a while and this is the crap they give me when I try to install windows. Other than that, windows 10 is pretty neat.