It is undoubtedly the boot partition.
Being FAT32 file system, that is the only Linux partition Windows can access. See the partition mapping of my Zorin installation below:
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Yeah. I have a bad habit of doing stupid stuffs. But this is how I learn.
Lesson here: DO NOT TOUCH the 500 MB FAT32 that shows up randomly in Windows 10.
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For sure. I just saved my butt. I'm back in Zorin OS.
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How did you end up fixing it. Boot Repair or what?
In general, it is better not to meddle with the files in other OS unless you setup a shared data partition.
Boot Repair through Zorin OS Live boot on the flash drive. I saw it reinstall grub and linux-header-generic.
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Thanks for confiring that. That info may help someone else one day. Good to hear you are back zorining again 
After I fixed it with boot-repair with live boot, I boot into ZorinOS safely. I checked with
sapphire@sapphire-X570-UD:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 223.6G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 223.1G 0 part /
It looks wrong. Where is the EFI partition now?
Extra photos
Can you post a Gparted screenshot.
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Your FAT32 EFI partition is on the first disk you show, not the second. But is only 100Mb.
You are dual-booting Windows, Yes?
Absolutely NOT. I know dual-boot is horrible when Windows 10 is on the same drive. That's why I put ZorinOS on its own SSD. It used to looks like @FrenchPress
's picture.
I remember when I tried to save as much space possible on a 7GB eMMC, I found that the boot partition could be as small as 100GB.
What do I do with the 539 MB on /dev/sda now? Should I move it back to /dev/sda instead of the /dev/nvme0n1
I do not think it is possible.
Moving a partition can be done only on the same disk.
The only thing I can think of is that you could expand pre-existing ext4 partition to take up this empty space. But for 240GB disk, you may not notice any difference.
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Due to the fact that /boot/efi on the same drive as Windows 10, this worries me when Windows 10 updates. That's why I want to move it. Too many threads related to the Windows 10 updates messed up the dual-boot situation in Linux.
I thought boot-repair would put the grub-efi on /dev/sda. Oh well.
The only dual-boot I have is on a 10 years old Acer Aspire.
It is a dual boot with Windows 11 (not a typo) and Zorin 16.
Since the system has a legacy BIOS only, it may not be the same. But I've never had a single issue with Windows update on this machine.
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Let's hope that is the case for me as well. I guess I will be back in the future for another rescue.
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I have a dual boot also, have been running for some time with windows and zorin sharing the same physical device. Windows will not access the Linux grub folders and same vice versa. Without the bootloader on the first drive, as it is now, you would have to change boot device to access zorin. While this is one way to dual boot, it is far from efficient.
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