Arch Linux

Goose722

Member

From: New Jersey

Registered: 2009-01-01

Posts: 4

Installing Arch from a USB drive

Guys, I need help installing Arch to/from an external USB drive.

I downloaded the i686 USB distribution from arch, put in an external drive using cygwin(120gb, intended for use for the entire OS) into it from my laptop(my current machine), and ran the setup. I'm not sure if I did it correctly, but I felt comfortable through it.

Initially, there was one partition on the drive, the LiveArch bit that I was using, and the rest was free space. I created several others, one with an ext3 filesystem, another for swap use, and a bit of just free space, formatted for Linux. I unflagged boot on the LiveArch partition, and flagged the ext3 partition. This gave me an error thing that said "Wrote partition, but re-read failed." This error went away when I marked the non-ext3 partition for boot. I kept the ext3 partition marked for boot and trudged onwards.

Next, on the filesystem step, I chose NOT to have a swap drive, as it did not recognize the swap partition I had made earlier, and chose the bootable, ext3 partition for /, and left the remaining partition untouched. I then installed all the packages I wanted, installed GRUB, and rebooted, expecting to boot into a fresh Arch install. Instead, it brought me back into LiveArch from that smaller partition.

One idea I had was to stick the LiveArch on an external flash drive and install it on the external drive I have instead.

Another note - there was no "Install Kernel" step on the installation.

What should I do to get this working?

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A God, a God their severance ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.