Mint 21 installation won't work on external drive

I've beeen trying to install Mint 21 to an external drive, and unlike my other VMs, it finds some reason to crash, and at times detecting a faulty hard drive and/or asking to eject the media (the only way I can see is to go to CD/DVD and "Eject) to continue the installation. I've made a number of attempts including installing Mint on my internal drive and then moving it to the external (and then deleting the internal copy) but it refuses to boot. I've never had this issue with Mint before, or any other VM for that matter, and could use some advice in how to get around this. Thanks.

 

same issue since parallels 19

 

Have you discovered a workaround for this issue?