You should have ran fdisk -l to check your drive setup. The install is straight forward however many of the docs online can be confusing. If you have an EFI system below is a quick install guide to show the entire install is not too overly complicated.
Installing Arch Linux on EFI System
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1.) Check your available drives default is 'sda'
2.) run 'cfdisk' to setup partitions, make sure to include boot/efi, swap, /root and /home partitons
Boot efi partitons are normally 500/mb (fat32)
Swap partitions are around 2500/mb
Root should be about 30-40% of remaining space (ext4)
Home should be about 60-70% of remaining space (ext4)
3.) Format partitions
SWAP Partition
EFI Boot Partition
Code:
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
/ Partition
Code:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
/home Partition
Code:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4
4.) wifi-menu #interactive wifi setup
5.) Check internet connection
6.) Mount drives
Mount Boot
Code:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
Mount Swap
Mount Root /
Code:
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
Mount Home /home
Code:
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/home
7.) Generate fstab file
Code:
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
8.) Install base system
Code:
pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware vim nano mc grub efibootmgr networkmanager
9.) chroot into new system
10.) Set timezone
Code:
timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York
11.) Set locale
Code:
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
Code:
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
12.) Set you hostname
Code:
echo yourhostname > /etc/hostname
13.) Create hosts file
(example hosts file)
PHP Code:
# Static table lookup for hostnames.
# See hosts(5) for details.
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 yourhostname #Change this to your own hostname
14.) Set root password
15.) Add a user
16.) Reboot installer into UEFI mode mount root again and chroot
Code:
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
17.) Create efi folder
18.) Mount efi partition
Code:
mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi
19.) Install grub
Code:
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --bootloader-id=GRUB --efi-directory=/boot/efi
20.) mkconfig
Code:
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
21.) Enable networkmanager
Code:
systemctl enable NetworkManager
22.) Exit chroot
23.) Reboot
Upon reboot you will be met with a terminal now would be a good time to add your self to the sudoers file
24.)
Code:
sudo nano /etc/sudoers
Look for root and add your username below it (example below)
PHP Code:
##
## User privilege specification
##
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
username ALL=(ALL) ALL
25.) Update Pacman Database
26.) Install plasma plasma-nm and sddm
Code:
pacman -S sddm plasma plasma-nm
27.) Enable sddm
Code:
systemctl enable sddm
Code:
systemctl start sddm
Reboot and make sure everything works!
Note:
Once you have a base system installed you may want to save the package list before installing AUR packages using
Code:
pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt
If you ever reinstall Arch all you need to do is run
Code:
pacman -S --needed - < pkglist.txt
This will save time in the future installing packages after a clean install.