I have a samsung SSD for the main system (tumbleweed) and a corsair SSD for other distros to explore (2. Tumbleweed, Mint, Ubuntu, MX, Manjaro, Nobara, …). Both can boot via their own grub2 (switching in the BIOS). This problem is only intermittently encountered booting MX with the tumbleweed grub2 on samsung, the Ubuntu grub2 on the corsair can boot MX always. The samsung’s Tumbleweed is updated daily.
These are the messages previous to the halt of the boot process:
Scanning for btrfs files:
/dev/nvme0n1p2
/dev/nvme1n1p2
check root file systems
done
mounting /dev/nvme1n1p3 on /root <== this is the MX partition
Failed: No such device
Busybox built in shell
(initramfs)
openSUSE does not use busybox and grub2 does not mount anything. You likely get more help on the support channels for whatever distribution you are booting.
What is mounting /root then during boot? And like I wrote, I use tumbleweed’s grub2 to start MX – which can intermittently be started by this very tumbleweed grub2 and always by the other installation.
Your distribution startup scripts. Probably, systemd if your distribution is using it.
Well, this is the very nature of race condition - you change some component, which changes timings and triggers (or not) the race. It does not mean this component is directly responsible.
/root is never mounted. It is never a separate file system. It is specially there to be the home directory of user root as part of the root file system, to assure that it is always there even if other file systems are not mounted (which would e.g. be the case when root had it’s home directory in a corrupted and thus unmounted /home file system).
In that case I assume that the message is genuine and the problem lies in a faulty try to mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 on /root. Which it should not do anyhow, /dev/nvme1n1p3 is the partition of MX, i.e. its / (obviously including /root). Any ideas how to troubleshoot this further?
Well, I reckon that as belonging to the internals of a btrfs file sytem that is implemented by doing these subvolume"mounts" (and don’t these have a @ in their mount point names?). But they have nothing to do with real file system mounts to build the directory tree.
I any case, the OP reported this on an operating system called MX and I do not know if that uses btrfs, nor did the OP mention that.
As I see it, he only posted here in the openSUSE foums because he apparently installed Grub using Tumbleweed, but further the link with openSUSE is almost non-existing.
I choose ext4 for MX. My main system is tumbleweed on btrfs which also provides the grub2 I originally thought guilty in causing this error (and is the reason I included the btrfs messages in the OP).
And you are right, the link to openSUSE is tenuous, but since I originally thought that openSUSE’s grub2 is the cause and MX doesn’t use btrfs…
Each distro handles various functionality with a different method, and options. Sadly, that’s one “deficiency” of Linux distros … they all do “things”, for the most part, differently.
The best way to discover the difference of some boot feature, is to compare the boot parms/ options/ etc