SSD error/corruption on btrfs format/install

ok going for a MBR boot. and openSUSE the only OS and BTRFS format.

Install mbr code to mbr (note I also install to boot but that is just belt and suspenders) Since grub does not know how to write to a btrfs partition it is best to have a separate 300-500 meg boot partition ext2 format. I still think that it is better to have a separate home and swap but that can be argued I guess. At least swap seperate so at minume you want boot, root, swap, and maybe home partitions.

Are you using USB or DVD? If DVD run the media check on the disk (note that does not work for USB sticks)

If you use generic mbr code then you need to know where the boot flag is and it should be set to the partition that has /boot in it. If you use grub boot code then it knows what partition to chain to and ignores the boot flag. It is also possible to have multiple boot flags but the generic will only try the first it finds.

I did that already. Please note the only difference between a booting or non-booting system is the presence or not of the swap partition in the previous screenshot. Just deleting or adding the swap partition doesn’t modify the MBR, does it?

no but there may have been a boot flag set if you are using the generic mbr boot code.

A better tool to see that is fdisk -l it will show boot flags. So if you some how had 2 boot flags set one on boot and one on swap it will not boot because the BIOS tries to boot the first partition with a boot flag. If you remove swap the boot flag for it is gone and now the BIOS can find the correct partition to boot. It is the only way I can think of to explain what you report.

You could have just removed the flag and still had swap. BTW though swap is not strictly needed it is really really good to have some.

I don’t know if that can be but I think the issue at hand here is an incompatibility at some point of the old BIOS/firmware of my MB with the recent SSD drive. Just not putting the swap as the first partition allows the PC to finish the hardware detection and boot. I ultimately went for an LVM setup which also works around the issue.

Any idea if using a SATA controller card would help me avoid such an issue?