Can it not boot due to the death of a non-system hard drive?

Question

Iron

Good afternoon. I have a computer with 2 hard drives - an Intel SSD ~ 60GB on which Windows is installed and a Seagate HDD of ~ 500GB, on which I installed most of the application programs, since you can’t overclock something on a small SSD. The HDD began to emit strange creaks, looked in win10 in the manager, and there the load is 100% for this disk. I realized that the disk is either screwed up, or something has hung and loaded it like that, or the malware is tormenting it. I didn’t think to throw off the data, but probably it wouldn’t have happened already.
I'm finishing the work ... it doesn't finish for a long time, I'm tired of waiting, I pressed the button on the system unit. Loading: "reboot and select proper boot device ..." . I climb into the BIOS, the HDD is already not displayed there. Well, to hell with it, the system is on an SSD, I try many more times to change the boot priorities (as I later realized, I changed it with a DVD-ROM :-))) and boot, but still the same error. So, if a non-system hard drive has died, why is the system not booting ?? Could this be because of the programs that were on the second disc? Like system utilities I did not put there.
P.S. Seagate turned out to be a 2 terabyte, and "crystal" is written on it with a pencil, which suggests that it had already been in repair before.
Is there any way to boot from someone else's hard drive and somehow run the system from my Intel?
P.S. I suspect that this happened due to the fact that I set up saving system backups on a dead disk. They weigh a lot.

Answer 1

Maybe if the Windows bootloader was on the HDD.

Answer 2

and if you completely disable the hdd and try to boot?
well, in general, you should think 100 times before buying Seagate
is not a cake from the word at all

Answer 3

Definitely, even a non-system dead disk can slow down the boot, because the system polls it anyway. I personally went through this several times. Disable physically suspicious hard and look at the download speed