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!

  • jsveiga
    5•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?

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I’ll have to try this

      I tried logging into gui and it hangs. While I’m at the spinning cursor of death, I cannot break out into a console. I’ll try the console first.

      I suspect you are onto the issue here - something in user config is looking for that optical drive and failing.

      Fstab has just hard drives, and it’s by uuid.

      I’m at work now, I can boot into manjaro by unplugging the drive - I’ll check the logs and see if there’s any clues there.