Primary SSD refusing to boot after disconnecting secondary (storage) HDD. What's happening? gaming computer builder

Hi gang, I'm having a very weird issue with my homebuilt monster machine and I need a little help.

NOTE The machine has been working fine for more than 2 years prior to this point. It's not a new build, I just made a minor change and this happened.

My machine has 2 hard drives. The one that runs everything, that has the Windows install and is the primary boot device is a 128GB Kingston SSD. When I first built the machine, this was the only drive and it booted and ran just fine. At the time, I had a 2TB external HDD with all my movies and stuff on it. It was on a dock and connected via USB. For the sake of condensing the number of wires and power supplies I had to deal with, I eventually mounted the 2TB HDD inside the case and ran power and SATA to it. I was able to assign it a drive name and access it within Windows and it worked fine. The main drive (SSD) is C: and the Big Drive is D:. Both have been fully operational for years.

I recently decided to set up a Network Attached Storage device. I unmounted the Big Drive to plug it into the NAS brick and move everything over...only to find that once the Big Drive was unplugged, my computer will no longer boot. It flashes the BIOS screen, then loads a black screen with this message:

"Reboot and select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key."

If I plug the Big Drive back into the internal SATA where it was, it boots like nothing ever happened. Unplug it, same error message. I have gone into the BIOS and made sure the SSD is the designated boot device. The BIOS can see it there, it is working. I know the Windows install is on the SSD, NOT the Big Drive, because as I said the SSD was originally the only drive installed in the machine and the Big Drive is strictly used for storage. But for some reason, the computer now thinks that it cannot boot without the Big Drive mounted to D:.

Does anyone have an idea what is happening and how I can correct it?

submitted by /u/hufflepufftato
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