Thanks to Giles and Alex for reporting their experiences, with Fedora and Ubuntu respectively. Since the computer runs off a live USB flash drive with Arch, it is capable of doing so -- it really must be something very very particular in getting the nvme disk recognized early enough on in the boot process, something that these other distros take care of automatically. The "obvious" suggestion, given the symptoms, are that some driver needs to be loaded right away to allow linux to recognize the nvme disk as bootable. The culprits most often suggested are the nvme and the vmd modules. I did try putting them in mkinitcpio and then rebuilding the initramfs image that Arch then uses to boot, without success. But perhaps I should try that again with a little more patience and care. I have Arch running just fine on all my other computers, having fallen back there when I finally ran out of patience with Gentoo over some of their architecture decisions, so if possible I'd like to run Arch on this one. Giles's dual-boot suggestion is very clever and I may try that if another assault on the initramfs doesn't pan out. Thanks! -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42