Installation Help

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Start a Live session

Plug your hard drive and wait for it to be recognized. Now run lsblk and look for your hard drive maybe by identifying it's capacity, now we need the /dev/sdX part. It should be /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1

Ex:

sda      8:0    0 223.6G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0     1G  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:2    0 214.6G  0 part /
└─sda3   8:3    0     8G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0   1.8T  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   0   1.8T  0 part /home

If I plug a disk it would be on sdc

Now you have identified your external disk

Fire up Fedora installation, pick the correct hard disk and install the bootloader on the same hard drive. If you install the bootloader on your current disk it will always show even when you unplug the external hard drive.

To install a Linux distro you need to identify the hard drive or partition for your system, pick a hard drive to install the bootloader and mount points.

Linux works the filesystem from a root "/", in my example, you can see SDA2 is my root. SDA1 is my BOOT and SDB1 is my HOME and ofc I have SDA3 for SWAP that is where RAM is written to in case memory is running out. All foldes go into the root when navigating so SDA2 will appear to be the top on the filesystem and will contain in /boot the data written in SDA2 same with /home and SDB1

Welcome to ask.fedora. What you're trying is possible, but the method isn't as simple as you think. What you've created is a Live system, but that's OK, because you need one as a stepping stone. Your next step is to boot it and make sure that it works properly on your hardware. Once you've done that, you can do a full install, but instead of selecting your hard disk, you tell it to use the USB hard drive as the target. Once that's done, you'll have a portable Fedora system that can be plugged into any computer and will retain changes from one boot to the next. Just make sure you back up your computer before starting this in case there are any difficulties.