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!

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Since it boots without the optical drive I would think it’s not hanging because you swapped the drive. Can you rotate the sata ports of your other drives and try again? Unless you configured something manually all of your drives should be detected automatically on boot. These days Linux partitions are usually identified by uuid in /etc/fstab to avoid issues involving reordering of drives.

    • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Did that. fstab uses uuid for identification. If I plug ANY of my drives into that sata port where the optical drive was - manjaro won’t get past login.

      Maybe my manjaro installation is borked and I don’t even know it (it’s actually been pretty good for a while now)

      • mvirts@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Interesting… Does the optical drive work on a different port? Does your bios treat that port differently?

        • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          1 year ago

          That I have not tried. I’ll try moving them around and see if it’s an issue with that port.

          I’ve moved drives to that one port, but I haven’t tried shuffling all the components around.

          My understanding with sata was that I should be able to move things around all I want. What would change is sda sdb sdc etc, and that’s why you use uuids in fstab. So it was strange to me that I couldn’t plug drives into that first port.

          I’ll shuffle things around more when I get home and see if I can detect any further patterns.

          Edit: as far as I can tell that port is nothing special other than it’s the first one. All the same in bios.