Installation Problems

[nujinini]

Hello Guys!

After a successfull download, this geek wannabe accidentally (stupidly I should say) erased my windows partition. I was excited to make my set-up but was surprised to see that the system of installation was quite different from all the distros I have tried.

arch wiki:

Arch does not offer a graphical installer, but rather, uses an ncurses-based install, relying more on the user for manual configuration.

Afterwhich I have to make a fresh reinstall of all my distros since windows cannot boot unless I remove everything first. Thus my absence from the forums.

Anyway, the sadder part is that I was not able to continue with my arch installation since I had a sort of "culture shock" seeing that I have to make some choice upon setting up. Its very dangerous to choose from things that I don't really understand. Things can happen like ....delete a whole partition accidentally

Anyway, if it would be possible, may I ask for some help on how to set-up my arch?
I know its gonna be difficult. Short of spoon feeding. But just in case, if somebody can make time, I would really appreciate it. Now I plan to do it first inside my VirtualBox. Just to protect myself from myself

Thanks a lot, cheers!

[oz]

Arch isn't oriented toward new Linux users, so don't feel too badly if you should run into problems installing and tweaking it. The best help for new Arch users is probably the Arch wiki:

ArchWiki

Beginners' Guide - ArchWiki

Official Arch Linux Install Guide - ArchWiki

Hope you have fun with Arch!

[reed9]

I recommend setting up your partitions first using Parted Magic or other Live CD that includes Gparted.

If you do that, during the Arch install, simply select Prepare Hard Drive -> Set Filesystem Mountpoints. It will prompt you for which partition to mount Swap and Root to, and then any others you can select manually. If you do not have a separate /home partition, all you need is root and swap.

Here is a youtube video walkthrough of the installation.

[ubume2]

Don't get discouraged. This Linux Newbie just successfully installed Arch on the second attempt. It will take a little work to perfect it. Been using Ubuntu for three years, I am sure that experience helped.

I recognize name of one of the other posters. And he was a help to me a few days ago. It took a second read of the Beginners Manual before I got the hang of it. Arch is a great learning experience.

[Jonathan183]

Afterwhich I have to make a fresh reinstall of all my distros since windows cannot boot unless I remove everything first. Thus my absence from the forums.

No need to remove all distros, just use SuperGrub to install Windows boot code to the MBR usually allows you to reinstall Windows ... follow that by a re-install of grub and everything should be back to normal.

As previous posters have said ... follow the beginners guide and things should be OK, and using PartedMagic for setting up partitions makes things easy.

[nujinini]

No need to remove all distros, just use SuperGrub to install Windows boot code to the MBR usually allows you to reinstall Windows ... follow that by a re-install of grub and everything should be back to normal

As previous posters have said ... follow the beginners guide and things should be OK, and using PartedMagic for setting up partitions makes things easy.

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I will read the begginer's guide on arch and watch the video first.

Will be getting back

[reed9]

I think I mentioned this in a different post, but if you can, have the Beginner's Guide handy during the installation.

Easiest if you have a second laptop next to you during the install. Or printed copy, but it's somewhat long. Or worst case, during the install, you can switch to a different virtual console (CTRL+ALT+F2), and use a text browser like elinks to look at the Beginner's Guide. (Switch back with CTRL+ALT+F1) I can't recall if the installation CD has a text browser on it, but I think it has lynx. If not you can install one to the live environment with

pacman -Sy elinks

(Obviously, you'll need to have set up your connection first.)

[nujinini]

I think I mentioned this in a different post, but if you can, have the Beginner's Guide handy during the installation.

Easiest if you have a second laptop next to you during the install.

This was actually what was in my mind.

I tried again earlier but it seems really very challenging so I had to stop lest I mess up again. I'll get hold of my son's old laptop later when he sleeps and give it another try.

Honestly, the line from the song of Frank Sinatra "..when I bit off more than I could chew" also comes into my mind whenever I try to install Arch. Makes me smile though. My guru friend said its really like that with source based OS. Anyway, if I can succeed here, I think this would be a good experience also. And then I can say in the end..."I did it my way...." Hehehe

Just trying to lighten my frustration