I have an external SSD attached to my desktop via a SATA to USB cable and I want to install Fedora on it.
I flashed the Fedora 42 Workstation iso image to a USB and booted into that USB on my desktop. When I begin the installation process, the Fedora installer can’t locate the external SSD and when I re-scan for devices it can only locate my desktop’s internal nvme drive.
I can see the SSD in the file manager and lsblk shows it is at sda but it is not mounted. I remember doing this several years ago and am not sure what I am doing wrong, any ideas, or is there a better way to install it on the SSD?
I also use a SSD this way. However I really always verified to use USB3. Is yours connected to a USB3 Port? With USB2 you might will have power issues.
That is what I do since about F36 with an external SSD. Over USB3. The point I try to make is if the disk is on a USB2 it could soffer power loss, and this could explain that the disk is not ready when booting.
Yes, specifically its SATA to USB3 cable, inserted into a USB3 port. I tried both ports same result. Also I tried on my laptop and got the same prompt – the Anaconda installer only detects the internal nvme drive as a possible installation destination. I also get the same issue with the CentOS Stream live iso
This means the auto-mount not works for external usb devices?
You still have the possibility to add the usb disk to the /etc/fstab and add the parameter nofail
Please do have a look to man fstab to get more information.
Depending of what you are tring to do with the external disk, you would need to decide, if you like a separate boot menu and efi partition. This would give you de liberty to run the system in absence of the nvme.
As I still use SSD as my boot diks, I can swap them. Meaning, putting the external, into the computer and viz versa.
I was able to get it working by unmounting and mounting the SSD.
so to recap:
Using my desktop, which has an internal nvme drive with Fedora installed on it, I flashed Fedora 42 to a USB3 stick. I inserted that into a USB3 port on my desktop and booted into the Fedora live session. I attached the external SSD via USB to SATA cable into a USB3 port on the desktop. From within the live session in the USB, I unmounted and mounted the SSD so that I could choose it as an installation target. Then I installed Fedora onto the external SSD.
So it worked.
However in that process I corrupted my boot process with grub: I powered down the computer and detached the external SSD and USB. Then I booted back into the desktop and was confronted with the minimal grub screen. I searched on my phone and tried to follow recommendations for fixing it but couldn’t replicate what others demonstrated online. While in grub, I tried for a while to set the root folder to (hd0,gpt3) on my nvme drive where the root partition was, but kept getting an error with grub saying that root wasn’t found. Without that step I wasn’t able to set the kernel and boot environment variables in the grub config file either. So in the end I simply inserted the USB with the live session of Fedora 42 back in to my desktop, booted into that, and reinstalled Fedora on my desktop’s nvme drive, which preserved all the data in my home folder (which was the only thing I really cared about) and gave me a clean-ish install, but I lost the applications I had downloaded, so not a major loss.