How to install fedora on its own drive without touching the windows drive?

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1

Hi

I want to install fedora on its own drive without having it touch the windows drive at all

I have 3 m.2 drives

Drive 1 is a 4tb boot drive for windows and Drive 2 is an additional 4tb for windows

The 3rd drive is a 2tb drive that i want to install fedora onto

I dont want the fedora installer touching the windows drive at all, fedora has to be entirely on the 2tb drive i have for fedora

2

Safest way is to unplug/remove all drives except the one you want to install Linux. Then install Linux to the only drive you have left in the computer. After Installation is finished you can plug back your other drives and during boot you will select Windows or Linux to boot. This advice assumes you don’t need/want to have boot options available in OS boot loader.

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3

Safe but NOT quick and dirty:

  1. Use gparted to create a new GPT partition table ( Device - Create Partition Table ) which will ensure a clean start.
  2. It is possible to create partitions during a Fedora install but I strongly discourage the practice. Installing on named and formatted partitions is much less error prone.
  3. If you want to install two distros, create format and name two FAT16 partions of size 90MB
  4. Create, format and name a partition for each distro. I specify 50GB but this may be too large if you have a small SSD and intend to store backup archives in addition partitions.
  5. During the Fedora install, select custom and ext4 filesystem unless you require features only found in the btrsfs (default).
  6. Do NOT unable a root account
  7. Do specify the user as administrator
4

Also boils down to machine hardware, example -

my lenovo laptop I can choose what is the default drive at boot, uefi is installed to said drive, so dev/nvme0n1p is windows, and dev/nvme0n2p is fedora,

( similar as example to dev/sda dev/sdb, neither drives interact with the other drives!

5

Backup and restoration will be cleaner if Fedora does NOT cohabit with Windoze. If Fedora is installed using a separate UEFI system partition, that partition and the Fedora partition can be backed up and restored at will. When Fedora and Windoze share the same UEFI system partition, Windoze issues/re-installation will remove Fedora.

6

The fedora installer is really clean and easy to use in this way.

When first starting the installation one of the very first options is to select the drive that fedora is allowed to use.

If you have drive 3 selected and verify that the first 2 drives are NOT checked then fedora will only write to that one drive and never touch the others. Even the automatic installation can be used this way and do its own partition creation that will be limited to that single selected drive. Fedora would create its own efi partition on the selected drive and during config it will find and enable booting windows from grub as long as the windows drive is still connected. If the windows drive has been disconnected during installation then grub will not be able to boot windows.

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7

I just used the fedora installer and selected the 2nd drive for fedora.
Windows 11 is installed on my 1st drive.

It just works.

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8

Just the other day, I installed Fedora 41 KDE on the d: drive of my mini pc. The c: drive is an nvme drive with Windows 11 on it, and I had previously added a 2TB SATA drive as the d: drive (don’t judge :slight_smile: it’s a mini PC and the only disk expansion is one SATA (or an external USB4).

The d: drive was one huge NTFS partition (for use on Windows), but there was about 500GB of free space on that drive. I used the Windows disk manager to “shrink” the ntfs partition (which took about 1 second of processing, likely because the d: drive was mostly data that was copied to the disk when new, so the end of the disk may have been completely empty?) ANYWAY, I shrunk the ntfs partition by 200GB so there was now 200GB of unallocated space on that drive.

I simply pointed the Fedora 41 installer at the d: drive and selected “automatic” and it saw the ntfs partition, ignored that, saw the 200GB of unallocated space, formatted that for Fedora’s use, and installed Fedora in that space. Then, you just go into your BIOS/UEFI and change the boot order from c: to “d: and then c:” and reboot. Booting from d: will give you your choice of operating systems at boot time: You’ll see grub come up and it’ll default to booting to Fedora, or you can select Windows and boot into Windows. Like Barry said: It just works.

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