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!

  • teft@startrek.website
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Check your boot order in your bios. Perhaps the optical drive’s sata port was first in the order and now the drive is there instead. If this drive doesn’t have a bootloader then it can’t boot. And since you are tripling booting maybe the bootloader is on a different drive which needs to be first in the boot order.

    Edit: Also I would take out all drives and try them one at a time in that first port until i could get one to boot, then I would put the other drives into the remaining slots.

    • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      The boot order is uefi hdd (which I can then pick the hard drive’s boot order in a sub menu), then uefi usb, then uefi optical drive, then network. I don’t think that’s the issue - it should always find something to boot before the optical drive.

      I’m going to try the one drive at a time in that first port thing and add/move the rest around. I haven’t been as deliberate with the troubleshooting here as I should have (I immediately went towards a software issue - fstab or something similar). I could have a port / mobo problem. Need to separate software from hardware issue better. Luckily I have three installed operating systems on three drives and plenty of bootable isos to play with. ;)

      • teft@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Need to separate software from hardware issue better.

        100%. Keep us updated. I personally love a good puzzle.