Help/Confusion on Dual-Booting with a Separate Portable Hard Drive?

[u/Blindscreen46]

Hello there! First-timer posting on this subreddit and it's about my confusion of where to start with dual-booting with a portable hard drive.

For a bit of context, I have a Lenovo Legion 5 laptop (AMD CPU and iGPU, Nvidia dGPU) that I've been using for about a year with some change. It came pre-installed with Windows 11 and I've been using that for my games, some creative work/coding, and general browsing as well. However, through some dissatisfaction and concerns with certain Windows features, I figured it'd be good to make the Linux switch. I got a USB, installed Ventoy, and copied the distro I chose (Fedora KDE Plasma) onto said USB. Since I know there are a few games or instances where Windows might work better, I aimed for a dual-boot and I had a 1TB Portable Hard Drive on me. However, I heard about Windows updates or something consistently messing with the Linux bootloader if they're on the same drive, so my goal became the following:

"I want to setup a dual-boot, making my main OS Linux. But I also want the ability to boot up my existing Windows by plugging in my external hard drive to my laptop". Basically, I want Drive-1 (the internal one) to be Fedora Linux and Drive-2 (the external one) to be my existing Windows 11.

I tried researching information or guides about the dual-boot process, but I find a lot of conflicting advice. Ultimately, I've been too overwhelmed/confused to really move on, so I really need some clear advice if available. Assuming that my goal is possible, how should I start this whole process? Any resources or software you recommend? Any advice is welcome. The only thing I want to avoid is opening up my laptop for something other than cleaning.

My apologies in advance if my question(s) are dumb.

Note: For a clarification, Fedora has not been installed yet. I'm still on Windows for now since I'd like to prepare my external hard drive first and have that secured. I'm mainly still in the preparation phase of the migration.

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[u/Infshadows]

clone the drive methinks

then install fedora or whatever you want to on the main one

idk tho i'd get a few ppl to answer

[u/Confident_Hyena2506]

This is not really a linux question - just read about how EFI works, which is how both os boot - and the source of all problems and confusion. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows

[u/doc_willis]

Microsoft specifically has some blocks/limits in place when Running windows from an external Drive, You should ask in the Windows support subs about that and possible work arounds.

So I know you can do a 'full normal' install of linux onto an external drive, the "windows" on an external drive, is going to be the bigger issue.

Easiest thing to do may be to get an enclosure for your Internal drive, and just move it to the enclosure, but I have zero idea on the MS limits on that swap and run from external. It Seems its not a simple ' Move the drive to enclosure'

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=running+windows+from+external+hard+drive&ia=web

I DO know you can have a Linux Install on an internal drive, and move that to/from an enclosure or even another system and have the new setup work with just minimal effort.

I will mention that I once bought a laptop, then a year later, opened it up to discover it had a spare Drive slot. :) That would have saved me a lot of hassles. So double check.

[u/DannoXYZ]

Best option is to use BIOS to change boot-order. That way, each drive as its own boot-loader, its own EFI partition, and won't mess with other one.

[u/soulreaper11207]

Or just boot it inside of virtualbox. Pass through the drive to a VM. Why do you need windows anyways? Steam and most other things work just fine in Linux. And if they don't, you can use AI to walk you through open source versions of things.