Arch Linux

BlightedDimple

Member

Registered: 2024-12-30

Posts: 1

After two failed installs (SSH), succedded but now left over failed OS

Hello all

Extremely new so please forgive my acute noobletitus. Consuming large amounts of Archwiki which I hope will lessen my ailments over the coming months.

I am bringing this up to help me find some clarity of what happened.

I installed two Archinstalls through SSH. The first two fails were my learning process. The third time I figured it out using ArchInstall but even though I had set each install to wipe the partition it seems like the installs over layered each other.

During the first failed attempt I tried installing Gnome. The second I installed additional packages(vim,htop,neofetch,firefox). The third I installed XFCE.

Welp,

Now I have an Arch OS which is loaded on Gnome(though stripped out - only handful of gnome apps), has all my additional packages I specified from the second install but also has XFCE apps and cosmetics.

I am assuming my partition / clear / wipes didn't work. Though between the second and third install I flashed back my old OS(Fedora41) and did to a clean install/delete partition.

Which further confuses me how all 3 Archinstalls are bleeding into each other considering I'm 99% sure I cleared/formatted the drive.

The drive is a NVME so that could be the reason if I look at it at a hardware understanding. Maybe the cells are not being flipped? I have been selecting encryption in the Archinstalls and setting my passwords so it seems unlikely?

Can anyone provide insights to help my learning journey?

Much appreciated,
BlightedDimple

Last edited by BlightedDimple (2024-12-30 21:00:26)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: After two failed installs (SSH), succedded but now left over failed OS

Please share the archinstall log and follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … ny_package to determine if the mysterious packages are known to your current system.

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,160

Re: After two failed installs (SSH), succedded but now left over failed OS

if you're new to arch I recommdnd you start your journey at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
the archinstall script isn't the noob way of setting up arch but rather a tool for experienced users to speed up the install by giving a menu instead of having to hammer in a dozen commands by hand
fun fact: as I play around with VMs a lot I got faster doing it the manual way than using archinstall
tldr: if you want to clean up your system start over and don't use archinstall but go the manual route - you'll learn what archinstall does in the background and where it fails causing what you ended up with