7. Basic Installation

Set through BIOS CD-ROM as the first boot device, and insert the latest base Arch installation CD and in boot: prompt press Enter.
After a while you’ll get the following message:
“Press Enter to get in a bash shell”

After pressing Enter type:

cd /
/arch/setup

 
So as the simple text-mode Arch installer to start.

Let’s move on.
Here you should pay attention while the installer starts.
The installer is manual but when we will finish we won’t have to change any other conf file for a long time.

So be careful to,

• use the arrows to read all the options with the order provided from top to bottom.
• when you finish with an option to press DONE to get back to main menu
• then you should go to the following option because the cursor will be still on the last visited
• never get back, only to the following one

8. Preparing Partitions

Here we choose Prepare Hard Drive.

Be careful.

- choose manual partitioning
- choose the correct disk you want to partition

You will see something like this:

Image

And we want to have something like this:

                                  cfdisk 2.12r
Disk Drive: /dev/sda
Size: 160100000000 bytes, 160.0 GB
Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 16000
Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type          [Label]        Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sda1        Boot        Primary   Linux ext3                         148,06 
sda2                    Primary   Linux ext3                        8603,65
sda3                    Primary   Linux swap / Solaris              3232,54
sda5                    Logical   Linux ReiserFS                   16796,03
sda6                    Logical   Linux ext3                        4301,83
sda7                    Logical   Linux XFS                       150168,94
[Bootable]  [ Delete ]  [  Help  ]  [Maximize]  [ Print  ]
[  Quit  ]  [  Type  ]  [ Units  ]  [ Write  ]
Toggle bootable flag of the current partition

This is the output we should have if we follow the fstab shown before. If you choose a different fstab configuration you should end up with different partitions as well.

This program is very simple to use. We choose a partition or free space with the arrows up and down, without pressing Enter, and then with left or right arrow we choose the action we will use on it, again without pressing Enter. When you press Enter the action will be started for the selected partition or free space.

The provided actions are:

- [Write]
It applies all the changes we have done in the partition table. We will choose it only at the and when we are completely sure we have made the correct changes. If something goes wrong then this can’t be undone.

- [New]
It can be applied only on free space. As we have mentioned before, free space should be always at the end of the disk and never in the begging or in the middle. If we haven’t already reached the limit of four primary partitions and we haven’t already created an extended partition we will be asked if the partition we want to create should be primary or logical. As mentioned before logical partitions should be created only if we need more than four partitions in the same disk. If we choose logical, automatically an extended partition will be created till the end of the disk.

You are reminded the “myths” stated in the beginning. You are advised to create logical partitions  only if you need more than four partitions in the same disk. If we choose logical an extended partition will be created till the end of the disk. After that we’ll be asked Beginning or End. Choose Beginning. Finally we will be asked for the partition’s reserved space and it will show us the maximum available. Be careful after you choose New you should definitely define the partition’s type. See below for that.

- [Type]
Definitely we apply this action after creating a new partition. For all linux partitions we choose type 83 and for swap we choose type 82.
 
- [Delete]
This action deletes a partition. You are reminded that we always delete partitions from the end to start. Never in the middle and never from the start.

- [Bootable]
With this action we do or undo a primary partition active or bootable. If a primary partition is bootable or not you’ll get a relevant indication “Boot” in the Flags column. In our example we will apply this on the first partition. You are reminded not to make any of your partitions bootable unless it is the first primary partition of your first physical drive, of the first channel, of the first disk controller of your pc!

- [Quit]
Quit exits the program. Any changes you have made will be lost unless you choose Write. So if you have completed the changes in your partitions choose Write and then you may exit.

With the above instructions create the partitions you have decided (in the image you can see the final state of our example).

Be very careful on what you are doing.

When you are finished select DONE.