Sometimes adding/removing a new drive can screw with the BIOS boot order, especially on older machines.
Have you tried just unplugging the optical drive without adding the new SSD in?
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Oh ya, forgot to mention that. It boots fine if I just unplug the optical drive. It’s when I plug in a new ssd into the same sata motherboard port - that’s when it hangs. It’s funny - it actually makes it to the login screen, it hangs only after trying to log in. I can’t even break out to another tty terminal.
Edit - the motherboard and chip and ram and video card are all new. It’s the old stuff I’m resuing-case, power supply, old hdds, ect
SSD is sus.
Make an install USB of any Linux. Remove all your SATA devices and install only the new SSD. Ensure that your BIOS can see it properly, and that it can try to boot from the drive with a no os failure. Install your chosen Linux to the SSD and ensure it boots. If it does just wipe it from the live USB again and try with all your previous sata devices connected. Sounds like it's trying to mount the drive and it's got problems or something else electrically is wrong and it's making rhe motherboard lose its shit.
Hmm lots of suspicion at the new drive. I wasn’t as deliberate as you described, but that new ssd now has arch on it and boots fine.
I guess maybe I’ll ask this question. Should I be able to just unplug an optical drive, and plug in anything else into that sata port without linux hanging? I wouldn’t expect the new drive to DO anything until it’s partitioned/formatted/mounted etc. but can I just swap components and expect to be able to boot?
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.
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.
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. ;)
Need to separate software from hardware issue better.
100%. Keep us updated. I personally love a good puzzle.
Oh, in that case it sounds like it is having issues reading the SSD drive for some reason. I have seen system hang trying to read a drive over and over again. Usually the drive is bad when that happens. But it could be a bad SATA cable or maybe some kind of a weird format.
My vibe is the OS checks the new drive on startup, and gets mad that it’s not formatted instead of moving along.
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?
Thanks for all the help! Lots of good suggestions in this thread I can try for further troubleshooting. Most importantly, you all confirmed I should be able to unplug an optical drive, put in a new unformatted ssd, and generally move drives around - and linux should still boot. I did not think things would behave that way, so when I had issues I figured it’s of course pilot error. Also explains why I was having such a hard time finding information on the arch wiki ;)
Now I know something ain’t right, and my guess is its some user configuration (because it does boot, it just hangs later). This has now turned into a side project (what the heck did I break), I’ll update the thread if I figure it out. It’s a pretty clean install, very few AUR packages (mostly flatpaks), and has been otherwise pretty stable-it’ll be interesting to see how it actually broke.
Thanks for the suggestions!