Bitcoin-qt and Bitcoind view the bitcoin.conf file differently.

I use Bitcoin Core 25.1 on Raspberry Pi. There is a .bitcoin directory on your external drive.

After unarchiving, the Bitcoin-25.1 package comes with a bin folder containing the Bitcoin-QT and Bitcoind binary files. The Bitcoin.conf file is located in the root directory of this folder.

When Bitcoin-Qt first started, I specified the .bitcoin dir on my external drive, and since then it knows where it is.

However, whenever you start Bitcoind, it creates a .bitcoin directory on your SD drive, no matter where or how it reads the bitcoin.conf file.

I use Bitcoin-Qt to play. The main operations are performed on Bitcoind. I expect both to read the same bitcoin.conf file, but that doesn’t happen. Additionally, Bitcoin-QT keeps crashing the QT part when switching HDMI using a KVM switch.

My questions are:

1. Where does Bitcoin-Qt actually keep its own conf file so that it remembers where the .bitcoin directory is when I move bitcoin.conf? You can delete bitcoin.conf from your computer and your external drive will still find the .bitcoin directory correctly.
2. How to make Bitcoind use an external drive? Every time you try to utilize the .bitcoin directory it will be created on your SD drive. I copied all the contents of the normal data directory on the external drive except the blocks directory and made bitcoin.conf point to the blocks directory on the external drive. But it wasn’t successful.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!