I am running mint on my main pc. I want to create an external drive with a different Linux OS, Nobara, but want to know if there’s any chance it will affect my mint install. I normally remove all the drives in my system except the one I’m installing a new OS to, but that’s less feasible with my desktop as I have several NVME drives behind my GPU. Can I leave all my drives connected, plug in a seperate SSD through USB, boot into Nobara live and install on that drive without it affecting my mint install? Also, if I do that will it put the EFI file on the seperate SSD?


You should do some research into using lvm - essentially one partition (pv) and named groups (vg), virtual partitions (lv’s) that you can grow or shrink on demand as long as there’s some free disk space still available
I like to name them by os + drive type, e.g. volume group names for you could be “mintnvme” and “nobusb”
That sounds like it would be useful. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the tip!