Fixed! :)
What was confusing me was that I was dealing with two problems. When I first installed the SSD it still had a cloned image of the primary drive. This very much confused the OS. I also had no clue the adding hardware would throw off my...
The drive is in fact an NVMe drive.
"Adding (or removing) PCI(e) devices can change the PCI ID of the other devices. This can break an existing setup when you add the drive. Also, make sure the drive is in a separate IOMMU group."
Not sure how...
I made sure that the drive was not in the bios boot order at all
I did not see anything in /etc/fstab that specifically referenced this device but I don't know what I am doing
The first time I had issues I tried wiping the SSD
fstab...
I used a 2 TB SSD for troubleshooting once upon a time. Now I want to use the same SSD in one of my VM as a passthrough device. The problem is, the system keeps trying to use the drive and craps out until I remove it.