installation on a second disk concurrent with using Fedora on the first

edit

Update: See the other answer by @raconteur below for a correction. You can do what you're asking about doing, but there are no standard processes by which it is accomplished, so you'd need to either research and establish the process yourself or discover and select from relevant processes perhaps offered online somewhere. My answer below is technically incorrect. An operating system can install another operating system onto a disk it possesses.

No, you can't do that. The current operating system cannot install another operating system onto a disk it possesses. You're going to need to install a disk in your system and, without mounting it in your current operating system, boot from a USB or other installation media and install the new operating system to the new disk, being careful not to overwrite data on the current operating system's disk.

Make sense? You're trying to do what's called dual-booting, which is running two operating systems independently on the same system. With this configuration, you can only run one operating system at a time. If you want to run one operating system within another, you have to install a hypervisor and other virtualization apparatus to allow two operating systems to share the hardware simultaneously.

If you can tell me your preference, I will be glad to point you to some documentation.

Of course, you _can_ do it. You can partition the second disk manually yourself (see parted(8)). You can install grub manually to the second disk. You can manually build filesystems with mkfs.ext4 or mkfs.btrfs or whatever you want. Then you can manually mount the filesystem(s) and install all the RPMs. I'm purposefully being somewhat vague here since there's quite a few ways to skin that cat.

There's no tool that I know of that ties it all up with a nice pretty ribbon in Fedora - in particular, not Anaconda as far as I know. Other distributions may have a tool tailored to support this - I'd like to know of any. You can do it with FreeBSD's installer.

I have manually done this in the past, but I never wrote it all up into a generally supported tool or set of scripts. I wish I had - I've wanted to do this a number of times since then.

I do NOT know if this will work, I certainly have NOT done it.

last time I used Virtualbox I saw the option to allow the guest to use a real physical partition instead of a file.

that could work for you - download the image you need & let VB use a whole disk - maybe anaconda will work on that partition/disk.