Prepare hard drive for installation

Working with storage devices from the command line could be intimidating.  In this article we are going to format the entire hard drive; it will wipe all partitions on it.

If you have other operating systems installed on your drive and you want to dual boot with Arch, or you want to install Arch on an existing partition without destroying other partitions on the hard drive then stop now and check out ‘prepare hard drive for dual boot’ article.

If this is your first experience formatting storage devices from the command line, I will suggest please unplug all storage devices from your system so you don’t end up formatting them by mistake. Plug only the one that you will format to install Arch Linux on it. If you can’t unplug them, then be careful with block device names.

We are going to create a new partition table and two partitions: root and swap. There are two kinds of partition tables: MBR and GPT. GPT is modern partition table and that’s what I recommend. But I will cover both MBR and GPT in this tutorial.