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

  • @beta_tester@lemmy.ml
    6•4 months ago

    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 💪🏻

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      3•4 months ago

      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.

  • @flashgnash
    4•4 months ago

    Installing arch on OneDrive is an entertaining concept

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      1•4 months ago

      But Microsoft would cuck your Arch install if it were somehow installed onto onedrive D’:

      • @flashgnash
        2•4 months ago

        It would still somehow manage to overwrite whatever would pass for a boot loader

  • The DoctorEnglish
    4•4 months ago

    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?

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      3•4 months ago

      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.

      • The DoctorEnglish
        2•4 months ago

        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?

        • reallyzen
          3•4 months ago

          @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.

          • Hellmo_luciferrariOPEnglish
            2•4 months ago

            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.

        • Hellmo_luciferrariOPEnglish
          2•4 months ago

          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.

  • @narc0tic_bird
    3•4 months ago

    So did you actually turn off secure boot in your UEFI setup? Or did you just state that it’s off to archinstall?

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      3•4 months ago

      I turned it off in bios. Sorry for confusion due to order of information or wording.

  • @xinayder@infosec.pub
    2•4 months ago

    I had a similar issue with my laptop, where Arch wouldn’t be recognized as a bootable system on my NVMe drive unless I disabled RST with Optane on the BIOS, setting it to AHCI mode.

    I do remember seeing a similar issue a while ago as well, but I don’t remember if the user managed to fix it.

    I could suggest removing the Windows drive, installing Arch and checking if everything works, then plugging the Windows drive back in. Windows loves to delete non-Windoes bootloaders from every drive it can.

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      1•4 months ago

      Ultimately, I removed the windows drive, it booted. But yay Novideo, I mean Nvidia drivers on arch is a pain.

  • lemmyreader
    2•4 months ago

    From past forums reading I remember that a boot loader in Linux can have trouble booting properly when you use two different physical drives (Rather than one drive and different partitions), I think it needs to specifically get to know about both drives. Does this help ?

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      3•4 months ago

      That very well may help, I read a bit of what you sent. I will have to try when not at work. Thank you!