First time install. Switching from win 10. Elected to erase the disk and go with Zorin. Instead of installing on the primary drive installed on my PC, the install program erased and installed on my external hard drive. The external hard drive was my data backup. Yes, I could have unplugged the external drive ... if I had known it was going to install on this drive. However, there was no notification that I was about to erase my back up drive.
Unfortunately this is a learning opportunity to have more than one copy of your data if that was your only copy of backups you had. Generally when you elect to wipe the entire drive it will allow you to select which drive to wipe. It's a little drop down, and it's sometimes easy to select the wrong drive (ask the guy who just installed Peppermint onto his computer and wiped the wrong drive because they're both the exact same model and capacity lol).
But I am always ready for something to go wrong. While this definitely sucks, imagine if this was just a random drive failure and your data was wiped from that disk, if that was your only copy you'd be in a similar situation. I hope the data wasn't too important to have lost if this was the case.
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When there are two drives available for installation, the default option to "Erase disk and Install Zorin OS" should prompt you to select which drive you want to use:
The last screenshot shows the changes that will be made, including the drive that will be used. Sadly, this is not exactly easy to read and could use some improving.
Ouch! 
Dude, I've done that before, on a MAC computer in the 90's. I was installing System 7.62 accidentally, on the very external drive used, to boot up MAC OS in the first place, to install System 7 on the internal.
After installing, I couldn't understand why the computer couldn't boot, and kept showing the usual folder with question mark icon, indicating no system disk, the typical oh oh image on screen.
This video shows what I am talking about for you GenZer's out there.
I kept saying, "I've done this before lots of times, I don't understand what I am doing wrong!" It took me 3-failed attempts, till I realized what I kept doing wrong. This was the time in my life, when I learned the lesson of, double check, triple check.
The stress I felt, quickly turned into utter embarrassment. In hindsight however, it did make me a better tech after that. 
