Which installer are you using?
The latest Archiso from the website. Created a live USB on windows using Rufus.
Care to elaborate on that? How does a scheme ask such a question?
I was trying to make a new partition scheme and IIRC fdisk asked to reboot to set the new partition scheme. After reading the forums I saw that the best practice is the use a swapfile instead of swap partition for an SSD so I wanted to merge /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2. I created a new partition at /dev/sda1 and extended it to /dev/sda2. At this point I performed the reboot as requested and I ended up with a grub that didn't find the os.
I now understand that I should have been using the system bios to set the boot to usb instead of using a broken grub to redirect grub-rescue to use the usb which is much more complicated. Thanks again!
]]>During the arch install the partition scheme asked to reboot to overwrite the old scheme and I did and now there's no OS at hd0.
Which installer are you using?
]]>I wish that was possible. As soon as I power up the laptop, I get an invalid partition table error. Then I enter grub-rescue. Thus, I am forced to boot the liveusb from grub-rescue.
FWIW the laptop is Dell Precision 6440 and the old OS was Manjaro with ~100GB XFS and 8GB swap at hd0. (During the arch install the partition scheme asked to reboot to overwrite the old scheme and I did and now there's no OS at hd0).
You are not interrupting the POST soon enough. After you power up but before you receive the invalid partition table error, you should be able to interrupt the process in order to configure your hardware settings, boot order, etc. At that point is where you can control selecting to boot from the Arch (or any other) LiveISO.
This is consistent with Trilby & Slithery's posts above.
]]>You can even unplug or entirely remove the harddrive. Assuming USB is in the boot order (just lower priority) this in itself would be sufficient.
(edit: "during booting" was poor wording as that would generally refer to the starting of an OS, but this is long before that.)
]]>Edit:
During the arch install the partition scheme asked to reboot to overwrite the old scheme
Care to elaborate on that? How does a scheme ask such a question?
]]>Edit: I was posting whilst you were editing.
]]>FWIW the laptop is Dell Precision 6440 and the old OS was Manjaro with ~100GB XFS and 8GB swap at hd0. (During the arch install the partition scheme asked to reboot to overwrite the old scheme and I did and now there's no OS at hd0).
]]>The previous OS left a grub at hd0 and now grub tries to boot from hd0 but since there's no OS there, it can't boot. So, when I plugin the live usb, I enter grub-rescue instead of booting from it. I need to boot the liveusb from grub-rescue so that I can re-install arch properly this time.
Don't boot to hd0 at all, that's the point. The USB is bootable, select it in your BIOS/Firmware, it doesn't matter what is on the harddrive: nothing at all needs to be there.
]]>The closest help I found was this, but I was not able to find the boot files from thr arch liveusb. Is there something similar for Arch live image ?
]]>grub-rescue
to boot from a live usb ?
I've tried
set root=(hd1)
followed by
insmod normal
but the grub-rescue complains that it's an unknown filesystem. Is there a guide to making a live usb on windows using rufus, loading it from grub-rescue for a clean install of arch (where do i search for the relevant boot files on the live usd hd1)?
Thank you!
]]>