Yes, sorry it has been a long day. Thought the question was from the OP, and totally missed the second part of the statement. Guess I need to work on reading comprehension 
Ok, thanks for the pointer. So this is an acknowledged libparted bug, which Partitioner picked up because of the libparted dependency.
So now the question is, what do I do to work around it so I can install Leap 15 on this disk?
Is the simplest fix to bring up Yast2 in my installed SUSE 13.1, and tell its bootloader to overwrite the MBR? Then will Leap 15 see the partition table that’s been there all along?
I was able to reproduce it easily on Leap 15 by writing your MBR on disk. Personally I would say this is something that both projects should be made aware of. May be SBM can be told to not install FAT boot sector on MBR.
Thanks for testing that. No, I don’t recall an option for that.
It would be interesting to know whether you managed to install previous openSUSE version on disk with SBM.
Yes, I did. I just told SuSE’s bootloader install to “not” install itself into the MBR, but rather to confine itself to the partition boot record. Then I just had SBM rescan the partitions, which detected the new SuSE install and let me boot into it.
If yes, it implies regression in openSUSE and you should open bug report also on openSUSE bugzilla
Actually you probably should file openSUSE bug in any case, simply to make developers aware of this problem.
Ok, I’ll do that later. Thanks for the help!
Following up to this thread for others who may have the same problem…
Short-term, I found that I can work-around this libparted bug affecting the Leap 15 Partitioner (with not being able to read an MBR partition table from an MBR containing Smart Boot Manager) by installing either of:
- SPFDisk 2000-30v (Special FDISK), or
- GAG (Graphical Boot Manager) V4.10
both of which are available on the Ultimate Boot CD alongside Smart Boot Manager (SBM) v3.7.1.
Unlike Leap 15’s Partitioner, these tools both have no problem reading the MBR partition table present on the disk, and will install in the MBR with no problems. With this, the Leap 15 Partitioner in the Installer will be able to read the partition table and allow you to get further in the installation process.
This is not a reasonable long-term solution though as: 1) these bootloaders are missing many features SBM has (which I depend on), and 2) the Leap 15 Partitioner still won’t be able read the partition table from other MBR disks you have SBM installed on in your system (or the install disk, if you install SBM on it later). The better solution is for libparted to be fixed so it can read MBR partition tables properly.
Past this, I hit a different problem while installing Leap 15’s bootloader in the root partition, which I’ll open another thread on.