Is it possible to install Manjaro straight on top of windows 10 without having to go thru windows just to get to the bios, could I perhaps unplug the ssd and then boot from usb or will the bios complain that it needs win. Never done this before, always installed Manjaro on Raspberry Pi’s up till now. I’m trying to find the route of least pain.
The pc has not yet even been switched on.
Hope that all makes sense. 
You should be able to get into the UEFI firmware setup utility by pressing a hotkey at boot time ─ the documentation of the motherboard (or of the machine) should tell you what key to press, and it may even appear on the screen during the POST routine.
Then, make sure that Secure Boot is disabled, that the machine boots in UEFI mode only ─ no CSM ─ and that the machine can boot from a USB stick if present. And then you boot up from the Manjaro stick and you wipe the Wintendo™ partition. 
When creating a partition table, create it as GPT, and create a vfat (FAT32) partition of about 512 MiB, with /boot/efi as the mountpoint and marked with the boot flag. And then you can create your other partitions. I recommend a separate partition for /home.
Depending on the amount of RAM in the machine, you may also want to create a swap partition, of at least the size of your RAM if you plan on hibernating the machine.
Personally, I’ve got 16 GiB of RAM in this machine and I’ve disabled my swap partition, because this is a desktop machine, I don’t hibernate it, and with 16 GiB I’ve got enough memory for what I do with my computer. But your mileage may vary. 
Yes. Oh yes. This would have saved me so much trouble over the years. Found out about this a year ago and it was great.
Thank you for the quick reply, I follow most of you you say but with reference to the quote below.
If I have seperate /home partition will it work with the rest (will it appear seamless)?
And why would one create a separate /home partition ??? ( Never heard of that before).
I also have 16 GiB Mem so I will leave that as is. 
Thanks again. I will begin unboxing and cable ferreting 
My own partitioning scheme is even far more elaborate than that, but then again, I approach GNU/Linux as a UNIX system ─ which is what it is. I’m not saying that you should do as I did, because it’s all a matter of personal preference.
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on Comments
/dev/sda1 vfat 511M 544K 511M 1% /boot/efi read-only
/dev/sda2 ext4 488M 62M 391M 14% /boot read-only
/dev/sda3 btrfs 1.0G 26M 768M 4% /
/dev/sda4 btrfs 22G 6.5G 15G 31% /usr read-only
/dev/sda5 btrfs 512M 3.4M 499M 1% /usr/local
/dev/sda6 btrfs 2.0G 101M 1.7G 6% /opt read-only
/dev/sda8 btrfs 400G 69G 331G 18% /srv
/dev/sda9 btrfs 450G 3.2G 446G 1% /home
/dev/sda11 btrfs 20G 3.5G 17G 18% /var
Yes, of course. The filesystem containing the user-owned files will be mounted at the directory /home, and will appear just as if those files would be hosted on the root filesystem itself.
So the directory /home itself will be on the root filesystem, but its contents will be on a separate partition.
Two main reasons…
If you ever have to reinstall the system, then you can safely reformat the root partition only, and then your user-owned files will still remain untouched.
If you ever suffer a filesystem corruption ─ it is rare, but it can happen, e.g. after an unclean shutdown, or due to some rogue process ─ then there’s a greater chance that the damage remains limited to only one filesystem.
Thanks, that makes sense and the table you posted with your partitions listed also makes more sense. I also have been trying to set up a separate DB server (Ras Pi) and a separate Web Server (Ras Pi), I assume there are good partition layouts (maps) for servers. Is there a doc to read about how best to partition servers perhaps?
I love it when a few more pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. Thanks a lot for the info
Well, there are several useful resources. 
And of course, there is the official site.
Note that many distributions also put the directories for www and ftp under /var, but in Arch, Manjaro and other Arch-derivatives, they are under /srv.
Lastly, you may also want to take a look at our #support:server category here at the forum. 
New x86 PC
Just want to verify… is this a x86 computer or a x86-64 computer?
Manjaro no longer supports x86 (32-bit)
It’s a core i7 which is x86-64 (I think).
Thanks for checking though. 
try before to update bios & firmware if possible
you will have to check all options in bios for a boot EFI
for check before installing , open a terminal
inxi -Fza
sudo parted -l
sudo efibootmgr -v
test -d /sys/firmware/efi && echo efi || echo biosuse Gparted to format in GPT , you will need a /boot/efi fat32 ( 33Mo) with flag boot & esp
( can be added by Gparted )
Thanks, I was ok with the bios stuff.
I didn’t know you could go to a terminal from the install so that’s good to know.
Thanks to @Aragorn, @realmain and @stephane I have a working system.
Yay! 
The 120GiB SSD I partitioned as follows:
inxi -P
| ID | Path | Size | Used | fs | Device |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ID-1 | / | 1.04 GiB | 14.5 MiB ( 1.4%) | btrfs | /dev/sda3 |
| ID-2 | /boot | 487.9 MiB | 59.1 MiB (12.1%) | ext4 | /dev/sda2 |
| ID-3 | /home | 70.00 GiB | 750.6 MiB ( 1.0%) | btrfs | /dev/sda8 |
| ID-4 | /opt | 2.05 GiB | 22.5 MiB ( 1.1%) | btrfs | /dev/sda6 |
| ID-5 | /usr | 22.00 GiB | 5.35 GiB (24.3%) | btrfs | /dev/sda4 |
| ID-6 | /var | 12.65 GiB | 212.8 MiB ( 1.6%) | btrfs | /dev/sda9 |
( Wonder where I got that idea from )
I am sure that I gave /srv about 12 GiB? But it’s not in the list.
However :
The PC also has a 1Tb HDD but I don’t really know how to partition it, the installer had a nice GUI that helped me do the partitioning.
And what should the partitions belong to.
Give a bit more to /usr and /var and the rest to /home?
Or just format as one big drive?
Really I should RTFM and figure it out for myself.
On the other hand, it’s good to talk!
Well, if you don’t find a separate partition for /srv, then you can create one on the HDD. I personally use /srv for my multimedia stuff, because I want that available to all user accounts, as opposed to using the ~/Videos and ~/Music directories that the freedesktop.org standards prescribe, which would make them available in my own user account only, and would then also be on the same filesystem as my home directory.
That said, I also have a (750 GB) HDD in this machine, which has an additional (but unused) swap partition of 20 GiB (in addition to the unused 10 GiB swap partition on my SSD), and the rest is a single, large partition that I use for the backups I make with TimeShift.
You always want your backups on a separate drive at least, and if possible even on a removable drive, or on a NAS. Just in case something ever goes wrong with your main drive.
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