Arch Linux

AndyWM

Member

Registered: 2015-06-10

Posts: 20

[SOLVED] Having Difficulties with an Arch Install (Asrock H81M board)

My university is very Windows heavy, though it has, rather had, a student run Linux computer lab. Which has been dead for the last year, I'm part of a small group trying to rebuild it - to start, so we at least having a working PC in the room, I just built a cheap PC (£177) (Pentium G3250, Asrock H81M BTC edition, 4gb 1600mhz RAM, 120gb SanDisk SSD).

I partitioned the SSD in accordance to the beginners guide for GPT/UEFI.
using parted
>mklabel gpt
>512MiB ESP fat32
>20GiB for root
>4GiB for swap
>rest for home
Exiting that; I set mkfs.fat -F32 for ESP
mkfs.ext4 for root and home
mkswap, swapon swap partition

mounted root to /mnt
made boot, made home on /mnt
mounted boot to /mnt/boot
mounted home to /mnt/home

pacstraped base and base-devel
updated fstab /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab
chrooted into /mnt configured locale and time
ran mkinitcpio -p linux
ran bootctl install
configured an arch entry, then set that as the loader default.
set the hostname and root password
exited chroot
unmounted /mnt
rebooted.

Nothing. I've installed Arch a few times now, (I use it on both my PCs). This one just doesn't seem to want to agree with me, when I remove the USB device I had the live system on, the UEFI boot order doesn't even have an option to select the disk. I've messed about in UEFI a little, I disabled something called CSM (compatibility support module), and set the Advanced\Storage Configuration SATA3_0 option to be an SSD.

This at least allows efi to show up in /sys/firmware (which hadn't been the case before I did that)

Any ideas? I'm clueless as how to even diagnose this.

Last edited by AndyWM (2015-10-17 19:59:46)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,778

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Having Difficulties with an Arch Install (Asrock H81M board)

updated fstab /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab

You should use `gen-fstab` instead.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_guide#fstab

I've messed about in UEFI a little, I disabled something called CSM (compatibility support module), and set the Advanced\Storage Configuration SATA3_0 option to be an SSD.

This at least allows efi to show up in /sys/firmware (which hadn't been the case before I did that)

`bootctl install` will only work if the installer is booted up in UEFI mode.

Load up the Arch live ISO with "CSM"/"Legacy" mode disabled and UEFI enabled and then mount your partitions, use `arch-chroot` and run `bootctl install` again.

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2015-10-17 19:45:26)

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

AndyWM

Member

Registered: 2015-06-10

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Having Difficulties with an Arch Install (Asrock H81M board)

Reinstalling bootctl once with all the legacy stuff turned off created the entry. Thanks, system is bootable now.