I have two internal hard drives in my pc, one has windows 11 and one is for extra storage.
I hooked up an external USB drive to install Linux onto. During the install it says
Device for boot loader installation
And then it gives me a number of options
/dev/nvme0n1 (this I think is what my windows 10 is at)
/dev/nvme0n1p1
/dev/nvme0n1p3
/dev/nvme0n1p4
/dev/sda ATA WDC WD10EZEX-00W (1.0 TB) Ii think this is the other internal drive
/dev/sda2
/dev/sdb WD easystore 2647 (1.0 TB)
/dev/sdb1
I think the easystore is my external drive. The problem is they are both 1T in size and both western digital.
How do I know which is which?
Just above where it says “device for boot loader installation” it shows
If I try to click on /dev/sdb I can’t click on install now.
On the basis that I should be trying to install in /dev/sdb what am I doing wrong to actually start the install process?
Yeah I’m new to Linux. I need help to do it right and not nuke my windows install
I appreciate the quick response but how do I know if the external drive is sda or sdb?
You can boot into Windows and use disk utility to remove all the partitions from the non windows hard drive. Windows will indicate which drive it booted from. When you go back to the Mint install media one of the drives won’t have any partitions on it and you can make new partitions there to install Mint
You should be able to drop into a terminal at some point in the installer and run a command to check the size of the drives. Assuming they aren’t the same size, the one that matches the size of your external disk is the one to partition.
To find out the name of your (attached) USB drive, run
sudo fdisk -l.
Ok. Got through the part of figuring out which drive is which.
Now I get this problem
It is saying no root file system when I try to install.
If I click the + symbol on the left side it gives me the ability to create a partition but I see nothing that says root
Yeah I’m missing something obvious. Where do I go from here?
The filesystem that it wants defined is the format for how data is written. Filesystem nerds can correct my bad description. You’re probably looking ext4 as per this install guide.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html
Edit: Your root is the base of the disk. In this case, represented as /. This is similar to Windows C:\.
