Installing Fedora 36 on a Secondary Drive

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To make a long story short, I have two disks in my system. One is a Windows-dedicated 512GB disk. That’s all I need for windows. That one id called “Disk 0”.

I need to install Fedora Linux on my secondary, 1 TB disk.

My secondary drive (1TB - Disk 1) is sitting there unused. It used to be my dual-boot Fedora-Windows., But when I bought the 512GB disk, and had the Geek Squad install a new version of Win 11. But of course, the Geek squad doesn’t know beans about Linux. But I restored my data from backups, and that was that.

So “Disk 1”, my secondary drive w/ 1TB storage is designated as the Fedora Linux (36) disk. I wiped the disk clean, and then installed it through Windows diskmgmt, as a Simple Drive, with the Drive letter “D” attached to it. I had to use exFAT because in Windows, the only other choice was NTFS.

When installing Fedora, I always use the "automatic partitioning scheme, so I figured it wouldn’t really matter about exFAT.

In any case, after several false starts, I realized I didn’t know how to tell the installer on the second drive. My fear is that I might inadvertently damage my Windows disk, which I have to use for my work.

Any advice on how to install Fedora Linux on a secondary drive?

Thanks,

BryGuy

2

You cannot install to an already partitioned space unless you tell it to wipe out any existing data on that device.

  1. Use the windows disk manager to wipe out the partitioning on disk 1, or do the same when booted to the live usb using fdisk or parted.
  2. During the install use the auto partitioning install and allow it to use both drives. This should use the existing efi partition from disk 0 for /boot/efi, and create an ext4 partition for /boot as well as a btrfs volume (both on disk1) to do the actual install. It will not overwrite the windows data on disk0 in this way. The default config creates two btrfs subvolumes for / and /home.
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