Yes, this was already solved by me. Since this is not specific to any one update or caused by any package(s), I thought this would be a better place than under the recent update topic.
I am posting this in case someone else ever runs into this edge case, since I did not find information about this problem getting solved the way it got for me.
I ran a system upgrade today since 2024-06-08. After a reboot the system hanged on every screen before login, including POST, but eventually reached SDDM and worked fine after logging in except that my DVD-drive kept restarting itself.
I rebooted again, tried different kernels and even downgraded linux-firmware. None of this worked. systemd-analyze showed 40 seconds for firmware (instead of under 10 seconds), blame was apparently on udisks2.service.
Then I was about to test unplugging my DVD-drive so I shut down my system. However, I realized that I had still had grub-mkconfig running and was sure that I just borked my system, so I booted back up.
Startup did not hang at all and the DVD-drive was calm again. I guess a reboot does not equal a poweroff like I imagined?
I wonder if the rarity of something like this warrants buying a lottery ticket, or maybe someone will indeed some day run into this as well and finds this post helpful.
It may be just my tired brain, but I didn’t really follow anything you said.
Either way, we do not edit the topic title declare a topic solved like on some other forums. Instead, we mark a reply as the solution by expanding the options under a reply and using the checkmark option.
Please reply with a more clear and concise summary of how you solved it and it can be marked as the solution. That way, when others do come across it, it will be much more helpful—seeing how that was your goal.
What you are describing — especially the POST delay — sounds to me like your optical drive may be intermittently failing. It’s probably the drive’s spindle motor.
This is perfectly consistent with how optical drives break down — I’ve had it happening in my previous computer as well. At first the failure is sporadic and unpredictable, but later on it becomes more prominent, and then ultimately the drive dies.
