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I have a PC which previously ran a W10 dual boot setup. The drive which had my first windows installation died, and now I can't boot into the second drive, although as far as I know it has a complete W10 install and all files intact. The drive is not recognized as a bootable device in BIOS. Can I somehow make the installation into a bootable one, without losing my files?

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    This drive was setup with Windows as a dual boot drive (was never setup and booted alone), maybe it doesn't have an EFI partition at all.
    – Yisroel Tech
    Commented Jun 16, 2023 at 16:42

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First, you need to understand UEFI and its boot process which depends on an ESP (EFI System Partition), a small FAT32 partition typically at the beginning of the drive.

The drive which had my first windows installation died

... and that drive likely contained the ESP where both .efi files resided.

Can I somehow make the installation into a bootable one, without losing my files?

You need to have an ESP and reinstall there the Windows bootloader and all this assuming you can (and know how to) change the drive order and OS selection in the firmware (UEFI).

With the aforementioned conditions met you then must boot from Windows installation media and follow the instructions to repair boot instead of performing an actual installation.

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