there is also a chance that the ahci mode isn’t enabled in bios. But changing it now, might cause windows to be unusable afterwards.
It’s the January ISO, so not the latest. See how the Welcome windows says “[ISO: 2024.01.25]”.
RTFS, right. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had to do that. Guess I’m a student again. Is that a problem if I’ve run YaY? That does update the system and repositories, right?
create a profile for windows in your UEFI motherboard
then boot with theses options for USB live iso Enos
your UEFI boot :
- Secureboot desactived
- no Fast , CSM or Legacy
- all disk on AHCI
open a terminal and check status
inxi -Fxza
test -d /sys/firmware/efi && echo efi || echo bios
sudo parted -l
- if you have to save data from windows DO IT before any install
- also update UEFI is better
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Any particular part of dmesg I should ficus on? The output is quite large. I did find IOMMU under a different name and disabled it.
There’s the result of dmesg.
Does this mean “read the f— situation”?
Anyway, I was just pointing out to @smokey that it’s not the latest ISO. I wasn’t saying that you must use the latest ISO. I replied to them, not you. 
So, yes, updating with yay or eos-update is just fine.
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Gotcha. A more socially correct version might be Read the Freaking Screen, derived from the age old Read the Freaking Manual.
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Running the first command as sudo I was able to see my 500gb drive finally. The drives were set to RAID rather than ACHI. So I believe I can now deal with that partition.
Given you warned me to do a backup, what’s the second command do? Anything irrevocable? I did a backup of anything I cared about to an external drive, but I’m hesitant to try out new commands.
Sorry had to take a short break, if you can see your partition now, you can do a installation as usual. The culprit in your case seems to be the ahci setting, that wasn’t set.
Now you simply have to choose the correct partition you want linux to be installed on (Assuming you’ve changed to AHCI mode and can see your 500 Gb drive now). If I did understand you correctly this would be your former Drive C:. Windows will be gone then. I would recommend not to touch the recovery partitions, if you want to go back to windows, in the case if you don’t get comfortable with linux.
If you’re 100% sure, you won’t use windows anymore, you could simply use the whole drive.
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I suppose i can always use that recovery as a backup after I replace the drives. I doubt very much I’ll be going back to Windows. Everything after 7 has been garbage and the recent rumblings about MS requiring an account and selling ads pace on YOUR desktop. No way. I may beat my head against the wall learning new things, but that’s not all bad. I really haven’t had this much fun using my computer in years.
Thank you all for your help.
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Before I forget. Welcome to EndeavourOS Community. 
Nice to have you here 
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When you’re multibooting, and you have a bunch of hard drives with a bunch of partitions and you don’t know which is which, what I generally do to identify the partitions is compare sizes.
For instance let’s say you have a 1tb hard drive and a 500gb hard drive
and your C:\ partition is on your 500gb drive.
You must first figure out which drive is the 500gb one (is it sda? sdb? nvme0n1?), you can do this using either fdisk -l or lsblk. The benefit of using fdisk is that it gives you more information (like the actual device model name), but there are also gui applications you can do this through like gparted.
Generally just your first job would be finding that 500gb drive.
Then once you’ve found it, look through it’s partition and find the one that’s roughly the same size as your C:\ partition, and now you have found your C:\ partition.
Is this a RTFS moment @AlerionTerolian ? 
I kid. But yes, this is one way to identify them.
Thanks very much for the explanation. Is fdisk a Linux command? I recognize it from my long ago DOS days. Turns out my issue was with BIOS, which I had a feeling would be the case.
It absolutely is. When i was a kid i could pick this stuff out. That skill atrophied. Now I have to relearn it all over again. But this has made PCs fun again. You all in the community really are great.
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theses do only one thing : return information for user ( read only )
Thank you. Lots of new syntax to learn. Lots of everything to learn.
Take your time and learn at your pace, also if you’re coming from windows i would suggest you start with plasma/kde or xfce as your desktop environment, they’re the most windows like, with plasma being more like modern windows (10/11) and xfce being more like classic windows (xp/7), i suppose there’s also LXQT as a possibility, but if xfce is reminiscent of windows xp then lxqt is reminiscent of windows 98 lol.
There’s probably going to come a point for you where you want to hop between desktop environments to find the one you like best, and that can be fun, but those are the ones you’re most likely to end up on.
In general people from certain oses willl end up leaning towards certain environments.
from windows: Plasma, Xfce, Lxde/lxqt (in that order, from strong pc to weak pc)
from macos: Unity,Gnome, Pantheon (In no particular order but gnome is the most popular and the default for ubuntu is unity which is heavily based on gnome)
from some kind of crazy programmer universe: tiling window managers like i3, sway, hyprland, xmonad or one of many many others…
You are also at some point probably gonna hit the question of wayland vs x.
There is a lot of misinformation, disinformation and correct informatino mixed up out there about them, the point is though, most of it is bullshit, and you should use the one that works for you.
When picking your environment it’s usually best to start with “Do I use wayland or X11/Xorg-server” because they don’t always have the same desktop environments, though gnome and plasma both support both.
The simplest answer for which to use is…
Are you using an nvidia gpu: Use X11 (Exception: If you’re on a laptop with hybrid graphics, wayland iso k)
- Do you have a multi-monitor setup? Different resolutions and/or refresh rates?: Use Wayland
- Do you have a multi-monitor setup but with the same resolutions and refresh rates?: Use whatever.
- Do you intend to use screen capture software? It’ll probably be easier on X, wayland has come a long way but support for this is still a bit spotty on it.
- Do you have problems with wayland? Use X11
- Do you have problems with X11? Use wayland
I would suggest you start by installing plasma not just because it is good for windows users, but also because it supports both wayland and x11 so you can try switching between them and see how it is.
PS: In case you’re really so fresh you don’t know the basics of terminal use, Tab is your favorite button in the terminal, it is auto-complete.
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I did install plasma and enjoyed it. For some reason it was able to detect my external monitor but after a reboot, I absolutely could not get it back. I’d read that Plasma might have issues with NVIDIA so I would up switching to XFCE. Which I don’t care for as much as Plasma. Ultimately I’m retiring this rig to be a media server or something and my new build will be straight AMD based.
I’ve some experience with command line interfaces. I go all the way back to DOS, so there’s that at least. I suppose I may have gotten more used to W10s interface as I found Plasma to be pretty intuitive, which is odd as I really liked Win7. I’d hate to go back to Win98 despite the fact I used it for years.
I doubt I’ll use Gnome based anything. I tried it years ago and it made me move back to Windows. I am curious about tiling windows, but I’ll probably run those on a virtual machine while I learn. I suspect it’ll be useful in running a home lab.
As frustrating as it’s been, it’s also been great fun. The sort of thing that got me into computing in the first place. Thanks for the explanation, it give me something to hang my metaphysical hat on when making sense of all this.
Based on that I’ve been using Plasma and Wayland and XFCE and X11 as if they are synonymous. Is that correct, or can you run Plasma with X11 or XFCE with Wayland?