When you say removed drive do you mean physically took it out of the PC. I have no idea why that would matter but I never did that step. All I did to dual boot mint & win 11 was put in an extra SSD and put mint on it. Now when ever I boot I can choose mint or windows before anything.
could be wrong but I think that’s the problem. I was always told do windows first so if you remove the windows drive you don’t really have a windows drive anymore so the install is wrong/buggy or whatever. Keep both drives in and do windows then linux