I’m trying to understand what happens with optical drives in general, and failing.

Backstory: I still have a SATA burner mounted in an expansion bay. I’ve been upgrading my pc for 15+ years and that bad boy is still kicking through all the upgrades. I bought a brand new ssd. When I went to plug it in, I realized I had run out of sata ports on my motherboard. I do have a usb portable optical drive so I really don’t need the old burner. So I unplugged the optical drive and plugged in the new ssd into the same port.

Now I knew something would break upon boot, but I didn’t care - let’s learn. It of course hangs on boot. If I undo the optical drive/ssd swap, it boots fine. Manjaro btw. But what file knows about that optical drive that needs to change? It’s not fstab-that’s just regular hard drives (no opticals listed there). Everything says that optical drives get mounted at /dev/sr0, but clearly something somewhere else needs to be deleted ala fstab file style. But what file?

I tried searching optical drive on the arch wiki and didn’t find what I was looking for with a quick skim (maybe I need to read it closer again)

Anyways thanks!

  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for all the help! Lots of good suggestions in this thread I can try for further troubleshooting. Most importantly, you all confirmed I should be able to unplug an optical drive, put in a new unformatted ssd, and generally move drives around - and linux should still boot. I did not think things would behave that way, so when I had issues I figured it’s of course pilot error. Also explains why I was having such a hard time finding information on the arch wiki ;)

    Now I know something ain’t right, and my guess is its some user configuration (because it does boot, it just hangs later). This has now turned into a side project (what the heck did I break), I’ll update the thread if I figure it out. It’s a pretty clean install, very few AUR packages (mostly flatpaks), and has been otherwise pretty stable-it’ll be interesting to see how it actually broke.

    Thanks for the suggestions!

  • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Sometimes adding/removing a new drive can screw with the BIOS boot order, especially on older machines. I would double check the BIOS boot setting before and after to make sure they stay the same.

    Have you tried just unplugging the optical drive without adding the new SSD in?

    • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Oh ya, forgot to mention that. It boots fine if I just unplug the optical drive. It’s when I plug in a new ssd into the same sata motherboard port - that’s when it hangs. It’s funny - it actually makes it to the login screen, it hangs only after trying to log in. I can’t even break out to another tty terminal.

      Edit - the motherboard and chip and ram and video card are all new. It’s the old stuff I’m resuing-case, power supply, old hdds, ect

      • jsveiga@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 year ago

        When you say “login screen” is it graphical or the console?

        If it’s graphical, can you drop to the console (ctrl+alt+F1 ?) and try to login there? And with a brand new user (create one without the ssd) or root? Just to check if it’s something triggered by a user config pointing to the drive.

        Also, is your fstab using UUIDs or /dev/sdXn?

        After the hang, if you boot without the ssd, can you then find any errors in the message log from the previous boot?