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!


I suspect your fstab has an entry specific to the optical drive and when you physically replaced it with an SSD, the fstab was not updated and Linux does not know how to reconcile the fact that it expected an optical drive and found something else. You likely just need to comment out the offending line… are you sure you checked fstab?
fstab is not limited to “regular hard drives”; fstab is for anything that the user wants auto-mounted on boot. Could be hard drives, SSDs, Optical, raid devices, etc.
It does not-that was the first thing I went after. I thought (incorrectly) that optical drives were in fstab and I was surprised to see only my hard drives there. Then I learned a bit more, sr0, etc and was like hmm, I’m missing something. ;)