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
What boot loader are you using? That is what allows you to pick between what OS (in your case, drive) to boot at power-on.
Are you using UEFI for this?
I am using UEFI, and GRUB for my bootloader. I did update my post with a bit more information now.
I was not able to select boot order in BIOS because it wasn’t reporting properly, or my drives were “messed up” along the way.
I did not have the option for my Windows drive listed as a bootable option. It did however show a generic entry for my WD Black drive (which is what I installed Arch on) as a bootable entry, but it ended up booting to windows after forcing the machine down because Arch hung at initializing Ramdisk.
I had the afterthought to choose to install os-prober for grub within additional packages.
Hmm.
Not being able to select boot order in BIOS suggests something very strange is going on, because it suggests that the BIOS can’t see all the drives. That has to happen before the bootloader can be evoked.
It sounds like GRUB is installed on the WD Black. BIOS -> drives it can see -> boot loader
What was the specific error that the Arch boot attempt threw? How did os-prober work for you?
@drwho @Hellmo_Luciferrari it’s not uncommon (and documented somewhere) to need to run os-prober a second time after install ; I had this 2 last times : install, get os-prober to find everything but W ; fully boot into arch when all is good, run it again and it will discover it.
Thank you for the tip. I didn’t end up trying os-prober at all. I just ripped the windows drive out, and was able to get Arch installed and booted.
The issue I have now is completely different now, but I will likely revisit having Windows on another drive for the very few things that it would make easier for me.
For now it is time to wrestle with my 3090. Which I can’t say I am exactly thrilled or shocked about.
I sorted out Arch not booting. By taking out the Windows drive, Arch boots just fine.
If I am not mistaken, having them on separate drives may have caused some issues. Someone else somewhere had suggested that is known to cause issues.
Not sure if it’s windows and GRUB fighting even though they are on two separate hard drives.
I did not end up trying os-prober at all. I went the more drastic method of removing the drive because the end goal is to ditch windows anyways.
Though my issues with Arch are a completely different thing entirely. Mostly fighting with my GPU to cooperate.