List the current partition structure of the hard drive on which you want to install Arch:

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lsblk

The commands listed below assume the following:

1. The HD is accessible via /dev/sda,
2. We'll use a GPT partition table,
3. We'll use 4 partitions, one for BIOS boot, one for /, one for /home, and one for Swap space, and
4. You are using a 1TB Hard Drive.

If your setup deviates from these assumptions, then you will need to change it accordingly.

To partition and format your drive run:

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cgdisk /dev/sda

This is a version of cfdisk that creates GPT partition tables. It works pretty much like cfdisk. In most cases, you can ignore the warning about damages GPT structures. Ensure that free space is selected in the the partition list, then invoke the New action.

A quick digression... There is 2 ways that the partitioning can go at this point, in my experience. If the First Sector of the new partition is set to a default value of 2048 it means that the tool will leave 1007Kb of free space at the front of the drive. This is fine at this point and the we will use that free space later. If the First Sector of the new partition is set to a default of value of 34 it means that you will need to allocate a small BIOS Boot partition at the beginning of the drive with a size of 1007Kb. Below we set the BIOS boot partition now before the other partitions.

Create a small BIOS boot partition with the following settings:

1. First Sector = default
2. Size = 1007K
3. Partition Type = ef02

Create a / root partition with the following settings:

1. First Sector = default
2. Size = 200G
3. Partition Type = 8300

Create a swap partition with the following settings:

1. First Sector = default
2. Size = 16G (I use the amount of physical RAM I have on the computer)
3. Partition Type = 8200

Create a /home partition with the following settings:

1. First Sector = default
2. Size = default - use up the remainder free space available
3. Partition Type = 8300

Now select the Write action in cgdisk and confirm by typing yes and then Quit. Now you can check the partition structure again by running lsblk. We expect to see something like this:

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NAME               SIZE       TYPE
sda                 1TB       disk
|- sda1           1007K       part
|- sda2            200G       part
|- sda3             16G       part
\- sda4            784G       part

At this point you have a new partition table written to the disk. But to make it useful, you will also need to create a file system in each partition. In our example, we will leave the /dev/sda1 BIOS boot partition untouched. Make a usable file system for our Linux partitions:

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mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4

Then create and activate the swap area:

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mkswap /dev/sda3
swapon /dev/sda3

Check everything is nice and tight:

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lsblk /dev/sda

Now you can mount the newly created local hard disk:

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mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

You should also create a mount point for /home and mount it now:

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mkdir /mnt/home
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/home

At this point you are ready to install the base system with the pacstrap script.