Ok, so you are using a regular BIOS through the "legacy bios" option, which is easier. Also, you have two HD's installed inside the laptop. The SATA port order is as of now unknown. Your disk order is however set in the BIOS at HDD then SSD.

Keep it that way and work with what you have. The problem here is highly likely to be a GRUB issue. First of all GRUB needs to know where it is! And secondly it needs to know the location of the boot disks. So if any of these HD0 and HD1 settings are incorrect, you will get these issues.

This issue would be a whole lot easier to solve with GRUB1 as you could just edit the config file and test with several options and several times with different config file settings. With GRUB2, you cannot rebuild GRUB unless you can boot into the distro which controls GRUB.
Seemingly in your first post GRUB cannot find itself. Later posts grub cannot find your Kernel, and in another post you are getting a Kernel panick.

These problems indicate not only an issue with GRUB and it's settings, but also an issue with the location of /boot. Due to the scope of these issues, I would recommend starting from scratch, if that is something you are willing to do. I assume you want to install your distro on the SSD disk. So before starting, put the SSD disk as the first in the boot order, and then never change it again. This could still be an issue, due to the physical disk location (hd0, hd1 etc). I am no expert on GRUB, but it should not be an issue, as this is most likely determined by the BIOS boot order, but I cannot guarantee that. The physical disk location could also play in here (sata-port1, sata-port2 etc).

1. Set your SSD to the highest boot priority in your BIOS
2. Install whatever distro you want to the SSD
3. Make sure /boot (if seperate) is on HD0 (sda/ssd) or that / is, if you are not using a seperate /boot
4. Install GRUB to MBR on sda (HD0)

5. Grub should also detect any Linux OS installed on sdb in addition to sda.
6. Check your grub config file after installation before rebooting, to see what GRUB chooses as HD0 and HD1 both for GRUB itself and for your distroes
7. Reboot and get GRUB2
8. Boot your distro

If this fails to work, I would recommend taking the Grub1 path as an alternative. Grub1 is more tolerant and easier to configure manually. It does not have all the "automagic" and building it's own scrips from scripts to be able to boot. With Grub1 you can easily change the config file as you please and very easily, to test out different Grub configuration options.

Perhaps also, instead of doing step 1-8 above, you can alternatively install GRUB1 directly, to your HDD MBR without changing the boot order of the disks in the BIOS. This will most likely create a chainload to the bootloader on the SSD which you have already installed, but this one might not work as intended.

PS. I recommend trying this with Manjaro

I don't use grub, and will not be any help there... however, in both my fstab and my bootloader configurations, I have started using either File System Labels, or UUIDs, in the "root=" sections... this way, I don't have to worry about how the system identifies devices (as /dev/sda or /dev/sdb) -- this especially helps with portable ssds that you want to boot off of, as you don't know how many drives are present in any random machine that you plug your portable ssd into.

You can get the UUID of any file system on any partition, by using command "blkid <partition>", so like "blkid /dev/sda1" would give you the UUID of /dev/sda1. But as UUIDs are long and cryptic and hard to remember, I started using file system labels.

When I create, say an ext4 files system, I give it a label with the -L flag like this : "mkfs.ext4 -L hostnamezroot /dev/sdb1" or whatever partition I want to make an ext4 fs on for my root partition. Then in my bootloader configurations, I can say root=Label=hostnamezroot, which is easy to remember, and will be found. I can also use these labels in fstab. I can also append it to the kernel boot parameters -- I would try that in your case... make sure that you have "boot=yourbootdevice" in your boot parameters, whether you are using /dev/sd#, or root=uuid= or root=label= -- they all work! I'm sure there's a place in grub for boot parameters somewhere.

Furthermore, the linux kernel doesn't need bootloaders anymore. If you can build a kernel, you can specify hostname, rootfs, and path to initrd in the kernel, and bypass all bootloaders.

It was a simple fix, really. Just swapping out the HDD and the SSD did it. The SSD(where I wanted to install the OS) was sdb, so that was causing the problem. Reinstalling after the swap works perfectly.

It was a simple fix, really. I swapped out the HDD and the SSD. The SSD(where I wanted to install the OS) was sdb which was causing the problem as the system boots sda first. Reinstalled OS after the swap and worked perfectly.

Wish someone suggested that earlier

Thanks for the update.

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Just swapping out the HDD and the SSD solves the problem.