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