I'm building up a new desktop system because I think it's time to replace my 4 core Intel one with a newer 8 core AMD. Bought an Asrock B550M Pro4 and a Ryzen 7 5700G. The system isn't nearly setup as I like but I think I should share some findings. This was the first time I played (have to play) with UEFI boot and GPT disks.
I have to say -
Concrates to ArcaNoae. I was surprised that handling EFI partition, UEFI boot with the AN Launcher and even creating a GPT partition on a 8TB drive works with ArcaOS5.1. Some things work even way better than with other tools/OSes.
More details - I started with a 2TB NVMe Samsung 980Pro. I partitioned this traditionally as MBR with Airboot and setup a ArcaOS partitions. But also made an EFI partition. I also reserved 3 partitions for Debian (swap, root, home). Also reserved some space for Win7 (which I didn't use later on but...). After the ArcaOS installation basically worked I installed Debian 11 in the reserved partitions. This went fine. But I can't get Debian 11 to offer more than 800x600 resolution. Some of the describes ways on the internet to use newer Ryzen with Debian 11 didn't work for me. Btw. ArcaOS supports only 2560x1440 on this system instead the desired 3840x2160 (needs a ticket and I hope David can fix this). So had to switch to Debian 12. This now works with the Ryzen integrated GPU in full 3840x2160.
I've to say ArcaOS installation went smooth but Debian was even easier to install. Debian also honors my partitioning (made with ArcaOS), means it didn't destroy anything in contrast to OpenSuse.
Now the hardest thing to install was Win7. Original W7 installation media don't work with NVMe and don't support XHCI controller. So I had to find patched ISOs prepared for newer systems. These don't wanna install on MBR disk because MS allows UEFI only on a GPT disk. So I put in another 2TB Crucial T500 NVMe. I prepared this with the ArcaOS installation stick as GPT and made the partitions for Win. As I was there I also installed onto the GPT disk another ArcaOS test installation. This time with UEFI support (extra EFI partition).
I also installed reFind cause I read it should be a good UEFI launcher. After playing a lot with all the options I have to say I like the AN Launcher better. I couldn't configure reFind to suppress unneeded ArcaOS, Win and Debian entries. In contrast the AN Launcher is easy to setup. It's also cool that with ArcaOS you usually give a drive letter to the EFI partition and so you can edit the config files there easily. For Win you need extra (time limited) software to access this TTBOMK. Probably you can do this from Linux too but I don't know Linux good enough to find out how until now.
Bad thing about all this UEFI stuff is that when installing different OSes or try to start from a stick you constantly need to go into BIOS setup and rearrange boot order. Or maybe this is a bad habit of my Asrock board. But especially Win changes things to start only Win next time. So you have to change in BIOS the right disk (EFI with your launcher) constantly.
Good thing about AN Launcher is also it seems to have some kind of fall back mode. If selected partition does not exist it shows a list of partitions on different disk you can chose to start. Needed this a few times.
OpenSuse installation destroyed the LVM information on my first disk. So one of my ArcaOS installation couldn't be started anymore. Tried with DFSee to repair but gave up. Used the ArcaOS installation stick and surprise, surprise, the disk checking tool mentioned the problem and was able to fix it. Thanks ArcaNoae. Even for me as a long time DFSee user it was way easier to let the disk checker do it's work than playing with DFsee myself.
I also put into a 8TB disk drive. At first I created a standard 2TB partition with MiniLVM. But afterwards I found out you should better use PTE.exe for that. With that you can create GPT partitions which are needed for such big drives. Luckily every ArcaOS installation has included gpt.sys in config.sys. So you can use such partitions even when added later on.
I also put into temporarily a 1TB SSD (SATA Crucial MX500) which I used to transfer data. When trying to copy a few partitions with all in all about 700GB of data ArcaOS reproducible hangs. I thought David had fixed the AHCI driver for this (I had a ticket about and lot of work went into solving this) but it seems there are some situations where it still does not work. Crucial offers firmware xx46 which should fix some very rare hangs in corner cases so I updated the SSD firmware from xx45 to xx46 (this time used Win for that cause way easier than the other options). I thought I've already updated this drive last year but not sure anymore. I'm not really sure all problems are gone now but at least I could copy my 700GB in a few 100'000 files finally.
So still under construction and will take a long way to setup a final ArcaOS main partition (probably when DE arrives) also take some time to prepare the Win7 I need it and a lot to discover with Debian and OpenSuse. But the first steps are done and ArcaOS works on bare metal here. Writing this with Seamonkey, the copied profile from the old system, and even with this long text no hang until now ;-). Six of the eight cores usually sleeps at idle. Hyperthreading is disabled although I looked nice to see OS/2 showing 16 cores. When Seamonkey is running power consumption is about 70W. Without about the half. Win uses less, Debian even less. Btw. Win7 can't handle 3840x2160 too. Such a shame AMD don't support this GPU anymore although it's a few years old anyway. If anyone knows a trick for Win7 and still read until here, please...
