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

    • @chakli
      3•11 months ago

      I also remember fiddling with secure boot on the bios menu.

    • Hellmo_luciferrariOP
      2•11 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.

  • @[email protected]
    3•11 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?

  • lemmyreader
    2•11 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•11 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!

  • @[email protected]
    2•11 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•11 months ago

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