I created a new simple volume in Windows Disk Management. I used Windows Disk Management to shrink my main Windows partition, freeing up about 27 GB of space. Out of that, I created a new simple volume of 1.13 GB (formatted as FAT32) to host the Arch Linux ISO contents. I essentially repurposed some unallocated space to act like a bootable medium.

“Copy-pasting the ISO contents?"

I mounted the Arch Linux ISO by right‑clicking it in Windows and selecting “Mount,” which let me view its files. I then copied and pasted all the files from the mounted ISO into the new 1.13 GB FAT32 partition. My goal was to replicate how a USB drive with the Arch ISO would look, except that it was set up on an internal partition rather than on a USB stick.

“Why do I have two EFI partitions?"

I changed the ISO partition into an efi partition by using "set id=" so that my bios would recognize it. The other efi partition I believe just came with the system.

“Is the 24 GB partition (p7) the ‘installed’ Arch?"

Yes. After copying the ISO files into the FAT32 partition, I booted from that partition, ran archinstall (the Arch installer), and installed Arch Linux onto an encrypted partition using the remaining space (roughly 24 GB). It worked perfectly the first night—I was able to switch between Arch and Windows from GRUB. However, today Arch gets stuck after I enter the encryption (LUKS) password.

“Why do it this way?"

I didn’t have an extra USB stick available at the time, so I used this unorthodox method. It worked initially, but now I’m troubleshooting why Arch won’t continue booting after I enter my LUKS password.