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

  • xinayder@infosec.pub
    1·
    10 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.