The images can be found at https://www.archlinux.org/download/

The image can be flashed on a USB with any software (balena etcher works just fine)

Boot the device from USB (UEFI if your computer supports it)

Check whether you booted in UEFI mode or not with

# ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

If the directory exists you're in UEFI mode, otherwise you're in BIOS

If you're connecting to the network via ethernet, check whether internet is working or not:

# ping archlinux.org

Instead if you're trying to connect to a wifi, do so:

# wifi-menu

# timedatectl set-ntp true

Check current disks:

# fdisk -l

For the partitioning scheme you can choose if you want to go with MBR or GPT as partition table.

The partition scheme:

BIOS:

MBR:

With MBR as partition table in BIOS mode you need to let some space unallocated before the first partition. The space left by fdisk by default should be enough

/dev/sdX1 mounted to /mnt with partition type "Linux" (root partition, you choose the size)

/dev/sdX2 mounted as swap with partition type "Linux swap" (swap partition, more than 512MiB)

GPT:

With GPT as partition table in BIOS mode instead you need an extra boot partition

/dev/sdX1 mounted to /mnt with partition type "Linux" (root partition, you choose the size)

/dev/sdX2 mounted as swap with partition type "Linux swap" (swap partition, more than 512MiB)

/dev/sdX3 with partition type "BIOS boot" (size of +1M, partition type GUID: 21686148-6449-6E6F-744E-656564454649)

UEFI:

GPT:

With GPT as partition table in UEFI mode, you need an EFI partition with type "EFI system"

/dev/sdX1 mounted to /mnt with partition type "Linux" (root partition, you choose the size)

/dev/sdX2 mounted as swap with partition type "Linux swap" (swap partition, more than 512MiB)

/dev/sdX3 mounted to /mnt/efi with partition type "EFI system partition" (UEFI partition, 260-512MiB, GUID: C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B)

MBR:

With MBR as partition table in UEFI mode, you need an EFI partition with type "EFI (FAT-12/16/32)"

/dev/sdX1 mounted to /mnt with partition type "Linux" (root partition, you choose the size)

/dev/sdX2 mounted as swap with partition type "Linux swap" (swap partition, more than 512MiB)

/dev/sdX3 mounted to /mnt/efi with partition type "EFI (FAT-12/16/32)" (UEFI partition, 260-512MiB, partition type ID: EF)

To start partitioning the disk you want you can use fdisk:

# fdisk /dev/sdX

Use the help menu that you can get with m to create a new partition table, create partitions like said above and write changes to the disk.

Format the root partition as ext4:

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1 Format the swap partition as swap:

# mkswap /dev/sdX2
# swapon /dev/sdX2

If you are in UEFI mode also format the UEFI partition as fat32:

# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdX3

Mount the root partition to /mnt:

# mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt

Install essential packages:

# pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware

These are just the most basic packages needed. We will install others later

Generate the fstab simply with just one command:

# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Take a look at it to see whether everything is fine, if it isn't just edit the file manually

It's time to switch the root folder of the bootable enviroment to the installation root:

# arch-chroot /mnt

From now on you can install packages simply with pacman -S <pkg>

Install some other basic packages: # pacman -S sudo nano networkmanager

To set the time zone and generate /etc/adjtime:

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime
# hwclock --systohc

Uncomment wanted locales in /etc/locale.gen

The en_US one is en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

So regenerate the locales and create locale.conf (the LANG variable needs to be set accordingly):

# locale-gen
# echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf

Create the hostname:

# echo myhostname > /etc/hostname

Add the needed entries to hosts:

/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1	localhost
::1		localhost
127.0.1.1	myhostname.localdomain	myhostname

Change "myhostname" with the desired hostname in the two previous commands

This step is usually not requires since it was already done during the installation of the kernel

To regenerate the intramfs:

# mkinitcpio -P

To set the run password:

# passwd

This step is crucial since you wouldn't want to keep using the root user for everything

To create a new user:

# useradd -m username

Now you need to set a password to protect the new user:

# passwd username

To get sudo permissions on the recently created user: # usermod -aG sudo username

Now you should be able to get sudo permissions on your new user.

To boot into your system after the installation you need a bootloader. The most used and suggested one is grub

Legacy BIOS installation Remember that if you're installing on a disk with GPT and in BIOS mode, you need to create a specific partition for it. Check the "Disk partitioning" section

Firstly install the grub package with pacman as said previously.

Now start the installation:

# grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sdX

Change /dev/sdX with the disk where you want to install grub (not the partition)

UEFI installation Firstly install grub and efibootmgr packages with pacman.

Mount the EFI partition to /efi:

# mkdir /efi
# mount /dev/sdX3 /efi

Now start the installation:

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB

This command assumes that the system is running as 64bit, if not just replace "x86_64-efi" with "i386-efi".

It's time to generate all configuration files needed for grub.

You can do so with grub-mkconfig:

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Multiboot installations For multiboot installation we need to install the package os-prober.

After doing so, we need to mount the partitions containing other systems and re-run grub-mkconfig.

Windows partitions will be discovered automatically by os-prober but the default Linux driver for NTFS may not be enough. If that's the case, install ntfs-3g and remount.

The installation of this package might be needed to boot successfully in some devices and prevent ERROR: root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exist

The package name is systemd-sysvcompat

Everything should be set-up perfectly by now.

So, exit the chroot enviroment doing either Ctrl + D or typing exit

Eventually unmount the root partition:

umount -R /mnt

Ultimately type reboot and plug out the USB drive.

Hopefully the system will boot correctly at first trial.

Congratulations, you installed Arch!

If everything went according to plans, you've just booted into your new system. The first thing you need to do is login into your user with the username and password that you created earlier in the installation.

Now that you booted into your newly installed system, the first thing to get the connection working.

Firstly start NetworkManager:

sudo NetworkManager

Now connect to a network with the command line tool nmcli

Check if the connection is working now:

ping archlinux.org

If everything works fine, enable NetworkManager automatically at boot:

sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager.service