I've spent about five hours trying to install Arch Linux, but unfortunately, I didn't turn off Secure Boot beforehand. I've previously used Linux Mint and decided to dive into Arch just out of curiosity. I followed the installation steps and didn't encounter any errors until the unmount and reboot phase, when I found myself back in Windows. I have two drives and intended to install Arch on my SATA drive, but I can't even see my SATA drive in the BIOS anymore, even though Windows recognizes it's connected in Disk Management. I'm wondering if Secure Boot was the only issue? Is there anything else I should pay attention to? Ideally, I should be able to boot from my SATA drive from the BIOS, right?
4 Answers
Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd want to go through this hassle. If you're looking for something that works out of the box and is pretty straightforward, there are plenty of distros that make it easy to get set up in under 10 minutes. Arch is definitely aimed at those who want deep customization and control, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
If you're finding the manual install too tricky, consider using the Archinstall script. It lines up with Arch's KISS philosophy and can save a lot of time! And if you have an Nvidia GPU, this is a great distro to install those proprietary drivers easily with that script.
Kudos for trying to install Arch from scratch! It's quite the endeavor, and you'll definitely learn a lot about Linux along the way. It's hard to pinpoint other possible issues without knowing more, but troubleshooting after trying the install is a good approach. Best of luck with it!
It seems like Secure Boot could be a major factor, but installing Arch can indeed require extra steps, especially when it comes to configuring the bootloader since it doesn't offer the same ease as distros like Mint or Fedora. If you want Secure Boot enabled with Arch, you'll need to invest some time in setting it up. Sorry to hear that you were thrown back into Windows, but it happens!
Yeah, I completely forgot to disable Secure Boot. I'm not really attached to having it on; I might consider it later once I get everything up and running.