How to install Linux Arch on a flash drive

[Stunty]

I want to put Arch on a flash drive to test it out before I have to buy a new harddrive. How would I go about doing this?

[Ad Bot]

[PurpleMetro]

Um, simply burn it to the flash drive?
Idk, I don't have a USB drive, so..

[TheBlackParrot]

I want to put Arch on a flash drive to test it out before I have to buy a new harddrive. How would I go about doing this?

You could use unetbootin.

[Pacha-]

what the forget is with so many people installing arch all of a sudden

[TheBlackParrot]

what the forget is with so many people installing arch all of a sudden

i bet anything it's the desktops we're all posting

don't do this stuff just because it looks cool you guys. find out what you're getting yourself into.

[PurpleMetro]

i bet anything it's the desktops we're all posting

don't do this stuff just because it looks cool you guys. find out what you're getting yourself into.

But you told me Arch was awesome, especially since it favored speed.
I have Arch on a CD, but I can't install it since connecting to wifi always fails.

[TheBlackParrot]

But you told me Arch was awesome

awesome in the sense of a linux distro
surely anyone with common sense would have looked that up before trying to install it but i guess not

[Stunty]

awesome in the sense of a linux distro
surely anyone with common sense would have looked that up before trying to install it but i guess not

I read it is like making your own operating system. It sounds fun.

[Axo-Tak]

don't do this stuff just because it looks cool you guys. find out what you're getting yourself into.

Listen to him.

Use a .ISO burn tool to burn the Archiso image onto a flash drive. (For BIOS systems only)

If you want to do an EFI install, you need to extract (NOT burn) the .ISO onto a FAT32-formatted flash drive and relabel the drive to ARCH_YEARMONTH, where YEAR is the year of the ISO, and MONTH is the month of the ISO. IIRC the current ISO label is ARCH_201306.
If you're on a Mac, then you need to do special steps and an EFI install without efibootmgr.

You can install Arch with a single root partition, rather than seperate partitions for each directory. In fact, I think a single root partition is ultimately better for the hard drive and faster.

[Maxwell.]

what the forget is with so many people installing arch all of a sudden

more like what the forget is with all these linux threads

[Nasoa]

If you don't know how to boot it from a flash drive, you might not like how many features you'll have to build for yourself.

[Axo-Tak]

more like what the forget is with all these linux threads

People tend to bandwagon on things. This might be caused by people trying to protect themselves from the NSA, or people who want their computers to run faster.

[KoopaScooper]

If you don't know how to create an installation medium from an ISO, good luck trying to use Arch as your first distro.

[Kalphiter²]

Universal USB Installer

[BluetoothBoy]

If you are currently on a Unix based system, do the following:

Open a terminal window. Then type in "lsblk" (if on a Linux), or "diskutil -list" (if on a Mac). Then, find your device (will most likely be something like /dev/sdb1). Remember that name. Make sure it isn't the sub name of the device (the current partition). Then, type: "dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/devicename bs=2048". Do bs=1024 if your computer sucks. Wait for it to finish. That's all there is to it!

If you happen to be on a Windows, download this, install it, and do the following:

Type: "dd if=C:\path\to\.iso of=F:\ bs=2048". Replace "F" with whatever drive your USB stick is under "My Computer". Then wait for it to finish, and you're done!