Installed Blu-Ray/DVD drive over SATA 3 link, no longer able to boot

I'm having a really weird problem after installing a new Blu-Ray/DVD drive last night into a SATA 3 port on my desktop. My installed Linux distribution (Ubuntu 12.04/elementary Luna/kernel 3.7.5) won't boot. It seems to hang after the modeset. I can get to recovery mode with the following kernel options: nomodeset recovery. A Fedora 23 MATE Live CD/DVD seems to hang right after finishing the initial bootup loading screen. I can get booted into a Clonezilla Live CD, but I can't get into either my installed Linux or a new Fedora. In the Clonezilla kernel log, I see that ata8.0 fails to initialize, saying that an IDENTIFY PACKET FAILED or something along those lines. This makes me think that either there's something wrong with the SATA port, the SATA cable, or the Blu-Ray/DVD reader device. Windows 7 on the same machine boots just fine and I can play DVDs in the device without issue. How can I debug what's actually going wrong so that I can fix it (perhaps with a kernel boot parameter)?