I just installed ZORIN OS without issue on my 'old' Windows 10 machine. I have 4 SSD's. Disk 0 has the Windows 10 system and installed programs on it and Disk 2 has the files and other data from those programs on it. I installed ZORIN 18 on Disk 3, a clean fresh EVO 870 and have the 4th available for other ZORIN files. I installed ZORIN with the Windows drives disconnected (I saw a thread about doing that and thought it was a good idea.) When I went through the install it said I had no EFI partition, so I made an EFI partition and proceeded happily with the install. Everything went great. I was about to reconnect my drives and found a thread in this forum stating that I should point the ZORIN install to my Windows EFI (to avoid conflicts and other issues). So, rather than going back and reinstalling ZORIN I was wondering if I could just remove the EFI partition on the ZORIN drive and go through the steps of pointing it to my Windows EFI partiton. Maybe deleting the ZORIN EFI and moving and resizing the ZORIN partition to the whole disk? It's only 100MB so it's not going to be much of a dent on a 1TB drive.
Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated as I've done a bunch of configuration to the new installation and would have to do it over again.
You can do either.
However, the steps outlined in your O.P. are more fragile and there is risk of the boot firmware not being properly registered.
Given that you just installed Zorin OS, a reinstall is more painless. You do not have an existing established system with a lot of personal files to fear losing, leading you to take a workaround approach hoping for the patch to work.
Well he still has Win 10 maybe he can find the commands for a command prompt conversion of the 870 drive from MBR to GPT that would make that drive basicly setup for an EFI install....wouldnt it? and yes a reinstall is the way to go for sure vs spending hrs and hrs trouble shooting
Back from the 'other side'. I deleted the 2 partitions and reinstalled ZORIN from the USB stick while referencing the EFI partition on the Windows system drive. I was surprised to see that the (I guess) Zorin GRUB came up without hesitation on reboot and I had both OS'son the menu. Painless.
Thank you both for the suggestions. Much better than hours of troubleshooting when I could be doing more productive things.
Could someone please explain why this is an issue. The reason I ask is that I just recently installed zorin os in a dual boot scenario with windows. I installed zorin to it's own drive partitioned as follows.
I did it this way so i could nuke linux without ever having to worry about messing up my existing windows installation. Also, /home will survive a re-installation of linux.
So I also have 2 EFI partitions and as far as I can tell, i have no ill effects. Grub found the windows boot manager on sdb2 (which is also EFI) and added it to the grub menu. Now when i boot the system if I choose windows, grub passes me off to the windows bootloader and windows boots normally. Otherwise it just boots into Zorin OS.