Ferdora installation to external hd and upgrades

Hi, I have a convertible laptop that is very handy when I am on travel. The problem is that with a 1TB ssd and plenty of documents I have no room to add a Fedora installation. So I’m planning to install fedora on a portable HDD, as I prefer to work with fedora when possible.
I found many tutorials covering this, so I guess that with the right quantity of headaches I may be able to do it. But there’s a question that I have not found covered by such tutorials.
Very often there are updates that involve the regeneratyion of Grub: Kernel an Fedora version updates. In such cases what happens to the portable Installation?
Will the HD remain portable or grub will automatically switch to a standard intallation, writing a standard boot record in the Laptop’s NVRAM and modifying the EFI system in such a way that it makes impossible to start the laptop without the HD and the HD to boot on another computer?
AndreaS

:joy: :joy: :joy: That’s a good one

You worry too much my friend.
This is Linux. Just point the installer to the external drive after booting up anaconda and you’re good. I run fedora from external drives a lot. Its just like using USB Live media except that you can run just about anything on it (including updates).

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Thanks, after a while I found the time to follow your suggestions: to stay on the safe side I installed fedora 31 on a portable flash drive from a diskless virtual box machine (in the past I messed my desktop nvram trying to install fedora directly from a USB pendrive). It looks like only anaconda invokes efibootmgr.
Everythig runs fine. The only annoyance is that in the boot menu there is a voice “Sabrent (the brand of my external SSD) UEFI Boot” that comes first in the boot menu and that does not work. This prevents me from booting In case I set USB as the first boot device in Bios.

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The boot order thing could be treated as another case. You got Fedora on an external drive and you said:

That’s music to my ears. So then, mark/tick the post that solved your question on this thread and start a distinct one for the new case. Have fun with your Fedora!

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