I have been using UEFI in my startup. As for an EFI partition, I am unsure (I believe that there is one but can't confirm as I cant reach a filesystem). Would you suggest using legacy?
Hey, it's worth trying. 
You can check by Booting into the LiveUSB Try Zorin and then running Gparted - the partition manager.
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Alright I will be checking now about the EFI partition, then I might try legacy mode.
I did previously use these USBs with etcher, is there any chance that that could have screwed them up?
YES, there is... In fact there is a thread on the forum for sharing experiences (horror stories) on using BalenaEtcher.
I would say the chance is high enough to make it worthwhile to temporarily try using a different USB stick if you have one available.
Later on, you can try doing a series of formats on the USB that had Balena used on it.
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I do have one brand new USB, I will flash that with rufus now. Just to confirm all the default settings on rufus are good right? (ISO vs DD)
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Oops, we got one more victim? 
Welcome to the club:
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Those really should be fine.
If no good, we may have you go over some BIOS settings - for example if you are using eMMC drive, ensure whether you are set to RAID or AHCI.
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Just checked the EFI partition, it is present and looks normal. Here's hoping it's another Etcher casualty (bricked three USBs if that's the case 
)
My drive is just a regular SSD (single drive)
eMMC and nVME are both a form of SSD (although in construction, they are more similar to an SD card than they are to a Solid State Drive.)
Ahh my bad, I'll have to check exactly the drive I have
update it is an nVME SSD if that makes any difference
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Saw something different on starting the live usb this time. Message flashed by pretty quick but I think it said "no cache detected." I'm not sure the significance?
No, that is usually harmless.
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Bad news... Even with the new USB I am still running into the same boot issues.
BIOS troubleshooting?
In that case, you should change your BIOS settings from SATA to RAID.
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I agree to try this given:
Unfortunately in my BIOS I am unable to find any settings regarding setting the SSD to SATA or RAID. It is the bios from lenovo so the options it provides aren't all that extensive
Is this it?
yes that is the one!
You are right about the poor BIOS option.
I did not see anything regarding RAID/SATA.
IT WORKS!
I have no clue what did it but after looping a few times it worked! I reset everything in the bios and disabled secureboot etc. and now it is starting properly!
I have a suspicion that etcher definitely had something to do with it not working because it showed the zorin logo once I used the fresh USB. Remind me to never use that again lol
Thank you guys for taking the time to help me out!
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