How to rescue a screwed up GRUB on a broken dual boot hard drive?

Installing Zorin OS
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#1

I have a dual boot HP laptop (ProBook 450 G6) with an NVME drive and a SATA SSD.

NVME: Boot partition (including GRUB), Windows 10
SSD: Zorin OS 16 Pro, NTFS Data Partition

Unfortunately, the NVME has got some serious "health issues" and had been failing while booting into Windows. I made some tests with hardware analysis tools like hwinfo and CrystalDiskInfo and they both showed way too high temperatures (~82°C) and a health status of "99% bad".

I thought I could just replace the NVME drive. It turns out that I stupidly installed GRUB on this one though. So after taking out the NVME, I can't boot into Zorin anymore.

Also, I couldn't make a backup ISO from the NVME drive, because of error messages leading to do chdsk (which didn't help either).

Now my question is:
Could I reinstall GRUB on the other SSD where Zorin is installed (is this even possible?) and then take care of the NVME drive and install Windows back on it or should I try to do it the other way around?

Any help or experience or future proof "How-to-not-screw-it-up-again"-tips are welcome :slight_smile:

#2

for future I'd look at Ventoy to give you USB Boot options and for the present problem have a look at boot repair disk

3 Likes
#3

Thanks, I already have a Ventoy pendrive which I use very often. Will download Boot Repair Disk now :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#4

I've never had success with Boot Repair disk or any GRUB repair option.
I would use EasyBCD from NeoSmart Technologies solution. This uses Windows MBR so that stays intact and just point the NeoSmart solution to the Linux install. My Vimeo tutorial on dual booting Windows 7 and Zorin 9 covered this.

1 hour 24 mins 15 seconds in.

#5

I finally managed to take on the task. It was dead easy with Boot Repair Disk (64 bit version). The only thing I had to do was to create a partition for GRUB to install, but the ISO even came with GPARTED pre-installed, so that was perfect!

Now I have one bootloader for each drive, which I should have done in the first place. So on start-up I press F9 (boot menu on my HP laptop) if I need to start Windows. Otherwise it automatically boots into Zorin.

Problem solved and now I even have more space on my new NVME :sunglasses:

1 Like
#6

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