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!
Yes you should be able to safely swap all drives around without any issue, unless you had an unusual setup (such as a swap file, or your bootloader, on a separate drive from your linux install partition).
Sometimes drives can be formatted/initialized incorrectly from the factory. Most drives, especially those for internal use, are shipped uninitialized, aka they have no file table system whatsoever, which linux should handle safely (but maybe it didn't). Less often they are shipped with a formatted file system, usually on external USB drives as fat32 or exFAT, and sometimes that FS can be corrupted real good in my experience. Idk. If its working fine now and passes all its self checks its probably just a weird fluke.