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Making a bootable Arch flash drive

Depending on your OS, it's a different process.

Regardless of your OS, first download the ISO image from archlinux.org. I recommend using the magnet link.

If you're on Windows, I recommend Rufus. Just set it to your flash drive and under Format Options > Create bootable disk using select ISO image and select the Arch ISO file.

If you're on Linux, just use dd in this format

dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdx status="progess"

If you're on Mac, figure it out. (unetbootin, how-to)

The last part is booting from the flash drive. Look up how to do it on your computer (it's usually just holding F2, F12 or Del during boot)

Once you do that, you'll be greeted with a black terminal. Now it's time to prepare you computer for the installation.

Preparations

Before you begin:

• Make sure you have an Internet connection, preferably Ethernet.
• Check if you have BIOS or UEFI:
  If ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars doesn't return anything, then you have BIOS and you can follow the rest of this guide.
• Run timedatectl set-ntp true to set the system clock.

Making the partitions

Partitioning, simply put, is making sections on your hard drive. Those sections are where certain parts of the OS are going to be installed.

Most commonly, you need 4 partitions for almost any OS:

• a boot partition - this holds all the necessary files for system boot.
• a swap partition - this holds temporary memory for programs and makes reading that memory a lot faster.
• a root partition - this holds all the programs and system files for Arch.
• and a home partition (optionally) - this holds you personal files and data.

Now you need to make those partitions, and you do that with fdisk.

fdisk needs to be run with on a specific hard drive.

To find your hard drive, run lsblk to see all the hard drives and their partitions. You should be able to able to find the hard drive based on the size of it.

Once you do, memorize the drive letter (should look like sdX, where X is a, b, c...)

Then run

fdisk /dev/sdX

fdisk has a couple of options that you need.

• p - prints existing partitions
• d - deletes the selected partition
• n - makes a new partition
• w - writes the new partitions to disk

If you already have partitions of a previous system on the drive, remove them with the d option. You have to go through every partition on the drive one-by-one. This will delete everything on those partitions.

Once you have a clean partition table, you can start making the new partitions.

The process of making a new partition is simple. The only part of the you have to pay attention to much space you give to the new partition.

The process is made up of choosing the partition type, partition number, its first sector and last sector (this is where you choose the size, essentially you choose the begging and the end of the partition).

You only need to adjust the Last Sector. Leave everything else to its default value.

As for the size, that's really up to personal preference. I'll give you some pointers and you shouldn't have any problems using the same sizes I use.

• boot - 200M
• swap - debated topic, you'll be fine with half of your RAM size.
• root - really depends on how much programs you're going to have and drive size, somewhere between 20-50G is good
• home - the rest, leave last sector empty

Now that every partition is made, use lsblk to find their drive number.

For the rest of this tutorial, I'm going to assume you made the partitions in the order I did and that they have the same drive numbers (boot is 1, swap is 2...)

Making filesystems

Now that you have partitions, you need to put filesystems on them.

I'm going to put the ext4 filesystem on every partition except the swap partition.

This is done with

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX(1, 3, 4) (boot, root, home)

Do this for each partition and with the appropriate drive letter and number.

As for the swap partition, it's a bit different.

mkswap /dev/sdX2
swapon /dev/sdX2

Now the swap partition is made and mounted. Next we mount the rest of the partitions.

Mounting the filesystems

These partitions exist, but they aren't usable untill we mount them. Simply put, we're giving them a specific location on our computer to access them and install our system there.

We do this with mount.

/mnt is commonly the designated place to mount drives, so that's what we'll be using.

Imagine that /mnt is the root folder of our system.

It only makes sense that we mount the root partition here.

We do this with

mount /dev/sdX3 /mnt

Now the root partition of our drive can be accessed through /mnt.

As for the other partitions, we'll mount them where they will be on our system, so the boot partition at /boot and home at /home.

First we make those folder and then we mount the partitions there.

mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /mnt/boot

mkdir /mnt/home
mount /mnt/home

Run lsblk to check if you mounted everything correctly.

Installing Arch

Now that everything is mounted, you can install Arch on your new system with

pacstrap /mnt base

This will install only the base system on /mnt.

Configuration

Generating fstab file

As you already saw, for you to access a drive or a partition on a drive, you first need to mount it. But, what mounts the system partitions, they need to be mounted automatically during boot to make your computer usable?

That's what the fstab file is for. It just a list of partitions that you want mounted automatically during startup.

For this, we're going to use genfstab.

If you run

genfstab /mnt

it'll output all the the mounted partitions and their information.

This is just a preview. To output this to a file run

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Output the fstab file to make sure it worked with

cat /mnt/etc/fstab

Chroot into the new system

Now it's time to chroot (change root) into the new Arch system.

arch-chroot /mnt

Installing the boot loader (GRUB)

GRUB is the thing that loads the OS and all its components when you turn on your computer.

To install it, we're going to use pacman, Arch's package manager.

pacman -S grub

When it finishes installing the package, you now need to actually install the GRUB boot loader onto your drive.

grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sdX

When that's done, all that's left is to make the default config file for GRUB.

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Setting the locale

You need to set the locale. In this example in going to use the US English locale.

Go to /etc/locale.gen and remove "#" from the locales you want to enable.

Then go to /etc/locale.conf and add the line

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

or whatever your language is and run

locale-gen

Configuring Network Manager and finishing up

Network Manager is there to configure and make connections, but also connect to the Internet on startup.

pacman -S networkmanager
systemctl enable NetworkManager #enables it to run on startup

Set the hostname with

echo hostname > /etc/hostname

And set the root password with

passwd

And you're done! All that's left to do is exit the Arch environment and unmount all the /mnt partitions with

umount -R /mnt

Now just reboot and unplug your flash drive.

If all went well, you should boot into your fresh Arch install.