Yes, indeed, a laugh a minute.
You can read my response to Ben about my experience with the utility (is that what it is called?) “Disks”.
No, it isn’t. I only tried it to see if it would work on the Manjaro PC. It works on the Windows PC but it is in the studio and not at all convenient, especially copy 100+ DVDs.
I did make an iso image of one of the disks with the Disks software but decided it was not really to my liking, although it took only about 9 minutes for a 4.5G DVD.
Thanks for your input. The information and sense of community is valuable to me – there’s no one within miles of me who knows didely squat about computers, especially Linux.
Ah. I wondered about that.
Good info – I’ll look at the system settings auto-mount tomorrow.
Thank you.
I tried both of these but no change. Thanks for the suggestion.
I’m marking this response from Ben as the solution because he was the first to mention power. Others did, too, like Argoron who spelled it out (“…the power supply…”).
But it may not be as simple as a PS going bad. I put a different PS in the machine and it malfunctioned the same way.
I had two SSDs and the two CD-ROMs all powered on the same rail. When I disconnected the two CD-ROMs and powered them on a separate rail, they worked like they should as soon as I powered up. Plasma did it’s automagic, to paraphrase Aragorn.
So everything is working now but of course I will replace the PS. Irritating because it is only two years old.
As usual, thanks to all the people who stepped up to help.