Arch Guide

Identifying your drive

Run: lsblk -o NAME,MODEL,TYPE,SIZE | grep disk

This should output a list of your drives like this:
sda VMware Virtual S 128G disk
nvme0n1 Samsung 960 Evo 250G disk

In this case, it means:

• I have a disk called VMware Virtual S that is 128GB in size, the current name for it is sda.
• I have a disk called Samsung 960 Evo that is 250GB in size, the current name for it is nvme0n1.

Remember the name of the drive you want to install Arch onto (e.g. sda). The drive will be referred to as /dev/sda (that's the device path). Wherever it says [DISK] in the rest of the guide, use whatever drive name you figured out in the last step instead!

Now choose your BIOS type...

Don't know which one you have?

Run this: ls /sys/firmware/efi

If it says ls: cannot access '/sys/firmware/efi': No such file or directory, you have a legacy BIOS.

If it lists a bunch of names like config_table efivars fw_platform_size fw_vendor runtime runtime_map systab, you have a UEFI.

In case you have a modern computer but it's not loading EFI stuff, you might be running your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode. Refer to your BIOS settings to figure that out.

Remember what you have because we're going to need this once more later on!