So, I am making the switch to using Arch full time instead of Windows.
Here is the rundown:
I have windows installed on one NVME and installed Arch on another NVME. After installing Arch on the one drive, and rebooting Arch hung at loading initial ramdisk. It never completed, I force shutdown my PC.
I went back into bios, and there wasn’t an entry for my Arch drive whatsoever.
In fact, before this happened I had all bootable drives go missing from within my bios.
So, after the reboot, I left the boot options default, and it did in fact boot to windows.
Other potentially important details:
I used archinstall rather than walking through manually.
UEFI
Secureboot off
GRUB bootloader
Unified Kernel Images on
Luks encrypted BTRFS partitions
Audio Pipewire
Kernels: Linux and Linux-Zen
Network Manager
Hardware:
CPU: i7-12700KF
Motherboard: TUF GAMING Z690-PLUS WIFI D4
GPU: EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3
RAM: Corsair VENGEANCE® RGB PRO 16GB (x4)
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 GT 1000W
Drives: 1tb WD Black SN750 (Drive intended for Arch to be installed on)
1tb Samsung 980 Pro (Drive windows is installed on)
2tb Samsung 980 Pro (separate data drive)
Should I remove my windows drive while installing Arch on another drive?
Rather, what would be the best approach to this?
Could anyone provide any help regarding this?
Edit: More details
I’ve never done it but at boot you should be able to choose from which drive you’d like to boot. You’ve got two drives and a usb stick with arch. Leave microsoft alone (remove, if you are afraid, and it’s ok to be afraid. Once, I did overwrite something important) and boot from usb and select the other drive when installing the OS. Then you should’ve arch installed.
Then, you boot your computer and select the drive from which you’d like to boot (arch). Set the arch drive as your default drive that auto boots after x seconds
Good luck on your arch journey and take time to understand everything 💪🏻
I also remember fiddling with secure boot on the bios menu.
That was what I expected to happen, as I selected my WD Black nvme to install Arch on (using archinstall because I didn’t feel like doing it manually) and upon reboot (and removing flash drive with Arch install medium on it) it did boot to Arch initially, but it froze at initializing ramdisk.
Upon booting back into my BIOS, it showed the WD drive as bootable, but I left it alone and it still booted to Windows.
Funny enough, I have installed Arch on countless machines, laptops, that desktop before. But somehow BIOS doesn’t see any of them as bootable anymore.
I quite love Arch, and I am currently using my Arch laptop to post this.
I think my next thing to try will be just removing the drive I have windows installed on and trying to install once more.
The last time I ran Arch on this desktop, I had too many issues with Nvidia drivers and wayland support, so I sort of gave up on it for a bit. Now that I have a bit more knowledge under my belt I planned to dive in head first and ditch the spyware we all know as windows.