Help on getting Arch Linux onto the raspberry Pi2

[lenzojake]

I don't know exactly where I should ask this but this seemed to be the right place.
I have been using other linux systems for a few years and learned some but a lot of the stuff I did was gui and I was hopping to move on past this level of understanding, and seem to have encountered a few problems. After I formatted the micro sd for my os
I partitioned it into two parts, root and boot. However even as root on my linux box the moving of the files to boot never seems to go well. I have the files on there and I can plug it in and get the starting colors and the wonderful scrolling lines of text but after that it will freeze.(I do already have root files on the second partition.) Another thing is that no matter how many times I have tried when I wget the file then extract it to my root is always says there is a error.
I suppose that I am just looking for possible solutions or areas that I should look at in my process that may contain errors. Really though any kind of input would be nice, thanks a lot.

btw I'm doing this from a ubuntu mate box as root for the majority of the operations.

Found that even when extracting the files to the drive as root I encounter errors, and I have tried to redownload the tar.gz.

[WarheadsSE]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lenzojake', 'H')owever even as root on my linux box the moving of the files to boot never seems to go well. I have the files on there and I can plug it in and get the starting colors and the wonderful scrolling lines of text but after that it will freeze.

[lenzojake]

Sorry to seem so unspecific but that is also the confusing characteristic of the extraction, It doesn't say! I would think that It would tell me something at least, but all I get is a "there was a error" message. I found through the process or extracting a folder at a time that the etc folder and the share folder seem to be the ones that are having a problem. I'm not too keen on the idea of going file by file to find the problem so I'm now trying to extract them using a different utility on a different box. I don't seem to be having luck with basdtar.

I really hope that there is a explanation for this weird and strange occurrence.

[lenzojake]

Sorry warheads, I almost forgot to mention the circumstances of the "error". It shows the colors and trys to boot about three times. During this the wonderful amount of scrolling lines makes in darn near impossible to read them. But I'll see if I can post an image of them after work. Thanks for the help.

[mhmediaonline]

One annoying and recurring problem I had was that the Liunx box I was trying to create the MicroSDHC card on had problems with certain device types on certain USB sockets. I usually put my MicroSDHC into an "old style" SDHC carrier, then Ito a USB card reader which would then go into a USB socket. It would work 50% of the time and then die, silently. I eventually traced the problem to my PC front ports not working properly, but the rear ones would.

So, to make sure your copy is completing properly:

1. Open a root terminal or do a "sudo su"
2. Enter dmesg and press enter: make a note of the last message
3. Insert your MicroSDHC card, and if messages don't appear, enter dmesg and press enter

You should hopefully see some sensible info about the card you just inserted - or maybe a series of error messages. If it looks good you can go on to do the copy, otherwise, swap it out for another card, or even try a different PC. I learned this the hard way - hope it helps!

[lenzojake]

I know it's a bit late, but I figured out some things that may be helpful to others. I found a .img file of a already setup arch linux system and flashed that onto my micro sd card, works like a charm. What I did find though is that the raspberry pi 2 only likes a few memory cards, if it doesn't blink the green light at all when you power it up then find a different flash card. here is a link to a page showing tested sd cards:http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards#Working_.2F_Non-working_SD_cards Really hope that this helps someone.

[cruzin]

Ive been having trouble also with setting up a sd card for arch arm for rpi 2b. What I found recently that worked for me was a program that comes in Linux Mint 17 is a usb stick formatter and usb image writer. I tried it last night and found when I woke up It had made 3 partitions on the 8 gb pny card. I opened the 2 partitions and copied boot from one and pasted into the other and used gparted to add a swap and increase the size of sdc2. I put it in a rpi 2 and it booted up fine. Hope this helps any one tying other than fdisk setup.