Yes, Thank you, I did format my SSD to ext4 first thing before I attempted to create virtual machine.
I worked my problem out and did not want to leave this thread orphaned, in hope of maybe helping someone else.
First of all, I was able to get a VM working using default settings from my local drive but installing on the SSD was giving me fits. I did get a working VM on the T7 which was great but I then tried editing my /etc/fstab to mount the device by UUID# instead of /dev/sdbx and that broke the VM. I was able to intermittently get a couple of VM's working by setting them up as root and a couple of other setups that I was uncomfortable with because it required me to run them with system wide sudo privileges. I was trying to do things that are a little more advanced than my skill level by setting up custom mount points and mounting the device by UUID so it wouldn't mater what port I plugged the device into and trying automount and nofail options in my /etc/fstab That kept crashing my system. I kept running into permission problems as well as other issues, so many in fact that I can't remember everything I tried. I decided to leave my mount points default and just plug the device in to the same port every time. I was finally able to get another VM working then it was broken by a system update. I spent 4 or 5 days trying to figure that out going as far as reinstalling my system and reformatting my SSD. Nothing I tried would fix the permission issues and I kept getting an error that I was trying to use storage that was not compatible with the dir file system. I new something was not right about that because every working VM that I had created was using the dir file system and the error i was getting was telling me my storage needed to be in the fat format. Finally, yesterday an update came down the pike for qemu and that fixed all of the issues and errors that I was experiencing.
I will tell you that I used chatgpt to work through a lot of these issues and it was very helpful. However it is limited in what it can do. You have to constantly direct it back to the history of the chat and it will tend to take you in loops to try and fix a problem (especially if the problem is unfixable do to a broken package caused by a system update). You also have to be knowledgeable enough to ask it the right questions. There is no doubt I learned a lot through this experience (as was my goal) about permissions and how to set them using chmod and chown, using virsh, as well as all kinds of commands that I would not have learned had I not had to do them repeatedly through the direction of chatgpt. I am pretty impressed with it as a learning tool.
Anyway. I learned that it is best (if you are at my skill level) to leave things default if possible. I'm talking about mount points and settings in the virt-manager when trying to setup a VM and run it from your SSD. If you can follow directions and have patience to learn it is very doable and really not all that difficult as long as you don't get too far off base with customization. I've got a pretty firm grip on how to work with qemu/kvm, libvirt, virt-manager system now although it took a little bit of learning and repeatedly using commends.
