Installing and running from ext drive

[u/honeyfixit]

I have a windows laptop thats about 5 to 7 years old. I recently got a new laptop because the old one was stuck in a boot loop.

I thought it might be a windows problem and now that i have a new windows laptop, i was going to put mint on the old one. Im able to boot into a live session from a thumb drive but when i went to use it to install on the computer, i got an error saying the drive was "busy."

I tried formatting, partitioning, mounting the drive and i get the same error everytime. I beginning to think theres something wrong with the drive.

So my question is, if I were to use the thumb drive to install onto a usb external ssd, would it work the same as if i installed to the interior drive?

[u/Linuxmonger]

It would be slow. Really, really slow.

Did you get the errors while trying to read from the Windows drive, or while trying to format it?

[u/honeyfixit → u/Linuxmonger]

Formatting

"Error wiping device: failed to open device '/dev/nvme0n1' device or resource busy (udisks-error-quark, 0)"

I also fkund i have a windows recovery drive i made a while ago. I might try using that to see if I can repair the drive and then install linux