Hi and welcome to my personal Linux hell. Let’s just jump to the chase.
A note before we start, any green/italicised text means that it’s customisable or that it varies. I’m also gonna assume that you already have the Arch ISO injected into a USB. Ok? Les go.
There’s 2 screens that you might see: the one with an Arch logo, or the plain black one. If it’s the plain black one, you’re good, but if it’s the Arch logo, you might wanna go into the BIOS and do some stuff there.
Now that you’re in the system, you should be greeted with a brick of text, then it will disappear. After everything settles, you should see some red and white text
If you have a different keyboard layout from US, write localectl list-keymaps to find your keyboard layout. Once you have it, write loadkeys *<your keyboard layout>*. If the text appears small on your screen, write setfont ter-132b to double the text size. No, as far as I know there isn’t a font that makes it fractionally bigger. It’s either double or nothing.
You can write timedatectl set-timezone *<region>*/*<your city>* to make sure your clock is synced to your location, but this isn’t mandatory as it will be dealt with later.
There are many tools that exist to partition your disk, but the one that I use is cgdisk. The Arch Wiki will tell you to do fdisk, but I find that cgdisk not only does the same thing, but has something reminiscent of a UI, so it’s easier to use.
Before you use cgdisk though, it’s CRUCIAL to know which of your drives are which. This is easy with drives with differing amounts of storage (e.g. in my case I have a 1TB HDD and 512GB SSD, so I could go in lsblk and check if the storage totals to 1TB or 512GB) or devices with singular drives. However, if you have a device with 2 drives with the same storage capacity, you can go into lsblk and see which drive is which by seeing the /dev/sdxn. “x” stands for a letter of the alphabet, while “n” is a number. X means a different drive while N is the partitions on that drive (think of it like C: and D: on Windows). If you don’t know which of them are which, I recommend you go into Windows and check using the Disk Management tool and note which drive has what partition with what amount of storage. Then, go back into the Arch USB (or whatever medium you use), use lsblk and REMEMBER which letter represents the drive you want to install Arch on.
So now that you have the letter of your drive, you can write cgdisk /dev/sd*x*. If you see that there are still partitions in the drive just delete them, there should be a tool on the bottom part of the screen that lets you select a few options. You can move by using the arrow keys. Alternatively, you could also go into the Disk Management tool in Windows and delete them in Windows.
Now with a blank drive, you have to make 4 partitions: one each for boot, swap, root, and home. Select the “free space” that has the biggest value using the up and down arrow keys, left and right to go to the “New” option. After clicking enter, it will ask you for the number of sectors you want for it. Just use the default for ALL partitions.
Swap is roughly equal to RAM, though not as fast. It’s like back-up RAM. Root is admin in Linux. Home is where all your files go.
Now that the partitions exist, you can get out of cgdisk and mount them boys. The drives, depending on their function, need to be mounted differently. Below are the ones you have to write for each partition, assuming you use my settings: