Thanks so much for your response and update on frenchpress
I did solve this problem and include it below to help anyone that might have a similar one, and this applies to zorin 17 pro with davinci 18.6. Also, a side note that i do have a nvidi 3060 that so far seems to be working with it:
The problem for me was my own lack of understanding on how zorin and davinci are agreeing on where the hard disks are located. I expected that the hard disks would be located alongside 'my computer' or someting like that, but the external hard disks are actually located in a folder labeled "media".
You will find it here:
/media/username/
After you substitute username with your actual zorin computer username. After that, you will put the name of your hard disk there. The hard disk name and actual file location can be more specifically determined by using the file manager, right clicking on your hard disk, looking at the properties, and whatever it says after "volume" will be its name and above it, you can see what i am saying about the location, which should say: media/username
Note, that it appears this location will be true whether it is for an 'external hard disk' connected via usb, as well as for a 'internal hard disk' connected via sata. From what i can see, ANY hard disk other than the one zorin is installed upon, will follow this prescription.
I had this problem because I was trying to basically re-link videos to the new mapped hard disk, and so i now select "change source folder" and then type in: /media/username/ followed by name of the drive and then the file. For other noobs, you can right click on your file or video in the file manager, and then see its location listed under 'basic'. You could effecively copy and paste this location into the davinci 'change source folder' popup window and should work from there. Just a note, you can re-link a number files within davinci at once, but just make sure that check that they are were actually in the original folder. What i mean, is that when you click on one file for 'change folder location' it will tell you what it had as the original location. So that will let you find where the location most likely is on your hard disk. Because, if you are like me, and have tons of videos, and also a pile of hard disks, you'll probably not remember where every little video exactly is. So, it will tell you where it is, or rather, where it was. You just probably need to change some of the low level folders to make sure it finds the hard disk in the correct location.
Good luck to any other video editors out there trying to make it work on linux. Hopefully this will help someone else out.