This morning after setting up the office laptop to get to work.
I started up an old laptop I had that I restored to original manufacturer settings. Or so I thought. On startup i noticed the system came up with a pristine Windows 10 environment. My system came from the manufacturer "back in the day" with Windows 7. It was a surprise to see that the contents of the recovery drive had changed. The bloatware was still there.
This isn't altogether a bad thing. I can reinstall windows manually if I want Windows 7 bad enough. For now this is okay. I was planning on testing a few Linux ISOs on the system.
First up is Alma Linux. After booting up to a multiboot flash drive I selected distribution I wanted and let her fly. That is when I noticed my error. I downloaded a version that gives 2 options to install but no "Live CD" version to test out. I didn't notice until I got to the section where it is requesting a destination drive to install. At first I was considering doing a partition for a dual boot. In the end I connected a flash drive I wasn't using and completed the install process.
Now I have a full install on a USB flash drive with Alma Linux I can boot up to.