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Formatting Drives

  1. You should now be inside the Arch shell. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like.
    arch shell

  2. With the command below, you can list all currently attached drives. In that list, there should at least be your main Hard Drive and your Flash Drive.

    root@archiso ~ # lsblk
 NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
 loop0    7:0    0 710.1M  1 loop /run/archiso/airootfs
 sr0     11:0    1 824.3M  0 rom
 vda    254:0    0    20G  0 disk

    In my case, my Hard Drive I'll be installing Arch to is vda because I am in a Virtual Machine. Yours might be called sda, nvme0n1p or hda, depending on if you've installed an SSD, an NVMe SSD or an HDD respectively.

  3. We are now going to format this drive using cfdisk. You can also format your drive with fdisk, but cfdisk has a simple to navigate interface.

    root@archiso ~ # cfdisk /dev/vda
    1. If your Hard Disk is empty, you're now going to be met with the following options. This will not show up if you've already partitioned your drive, like if you're coming from Windows, so if you see your partitions already, go to step 2.
      select label type cfdisk
      Here, choose gpt (GUID Partition Table) for drives bigger than 2 TB and machines using UEFI and dos (Master Boot Record) otherwise. Once you come to this screen, you can skip the next step. cfdisk empty
    2. If you come from another operating system, you're going to have a few entries here. You can either remove all the partitions, or create new ones to install Arch into. To remove partitions, use your arrow keys to navigate to the delete option and hit enter for each partition you'd like to delete. delete partition
    3. Once you've got an empty slate, we can start creating all the necessary partitions. Create them in the order and sizes shown below.
    Partition Size
    Boot 100M
    Swap Half your RAM
    Root The rest of your storage

    Tip: You can also create a Home partition now, if you want to be able to change distros without deleting your user data

    Your Partitions should look something similar to this: cfdisk-finished

    1. Once you're done partitioning your drive, you can go over to the Write option, hit enter, and confirm the partitioning process by typing yes. Then you can quit out of cfdisk.

    Danger! This process will permanently delete any partitions you chose to delete. Double-check your partitioning scheme, so that you do not delete important data.

    confirm deletion

  4. We can now properly format the drives. For that, we need to know how the new partitions are called. Run lsblk again. In the guide above, we created the partitions like in the table below, and lsblk reflects that.

    Partition Name
    Boot /dev/vda1
    Swap /dev/vda2
    Root /dev/vda3

    1. Let's first format the boot and root partitions with the following commands. Note that the boot partition has to be in FAT32, otherwise it won't be recognized:

      #==> Important: replace /dev/vda with your drive!
root@archiso ~ # mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/vda1 root@archiso ~ # mkfs.ext4 /dev/vda3

      Note: You can also format your root partition to be in the BTRFS format, which allows snapshots. Just replace ext4 with btrfs in the command above.


    2. Formatting the swap partition is a little different:

      #==> Important: replace /dev/vda with your drive!
root@archiso ~ # mkswap /dev/vda2

You're done! You can now go to the next step of mounting the drives and installing Arch!

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