I broke GRUB :(

Okay so I did some OS shenanigans and I ended up breaking ZorinOS grub somehow.

What I did:

I installed KDE Neon - Bigscreen (yes, I know its for devs I just REALLY wanted to try it outside of a VM)

and uhh that's basically it.
My guess is that KDE Neon's grub just kinda... overrided ZorinOS's grub.
IDK man lol.

While I could've just kept KDE Neon to boot into this ZorinOS instance, I tried to use Zorin's install .iso to re-install the OS pretty much (and yknow kinda merge with my home folder)

Apparently that's not a feature soo here I am. Having 2 ZorinOS instances on my PC because I need to boot into this ZorinOS.

Uhhh.. welp.

Not directly overrided but take the Place of it. Theoretically, You could change that back when You go in the BIOS and set in the Boot Order Zorin at first Position. then boot into Zorin and make a sudo update-grub so that Neon would be detected and is as Entry in the Zorin GRUB Menu as a Choice.

So, You installed Zorin a 2nd Time and now You have 2x Zorin and 1x Neon. Is that correct? Could You install GParted with sudo apt install gparted open it and make a Screenshot of Your Partitions please? So, we can get a better Overview.

Also: Do You have more that one Drive in Your system and are the OS'es each on a seperate Drive or all on one Drive?

1 Like

No sorry I explained that wrong, I formatted the Neon partition to see if it'll boot into Zorin, And it didn't work so I installed a 2nd Zorin to maybe merge like I said before.

The problem is my normal Zorin instance doesn't boot into it's GUI when it's alone, Instead it just kinda sends me to the Grub command-line thingy

1 Like

And this is with both Zorin Installations?

Can You make a Picture of the Menu?

Beside the Points above: You could take a Bootstick with Zorin, start it in Live Mode and use there ''Boot Repair'' and let it run.

1 Like

I didn't know there was boot repair, Give me a bit I'll see if I can just do that instead

1 Like

But it is only available in Live Mode, not on the installed OS.

1 Like

I'm on my live environment and I don't know where the repair button is exactly?

I'm guessing it's the "Install Zorin OS 18.1"
But from what i'm seeing it's just the installation

I found "Boot repair"

1 Like

Thanks alot! It worked!

2 Likes

Does the "boot repair" also work on a dual boot system if Windows 11 during an update messes up the Grub dual boot setup?

Note: I've heard that Windows 11 is notorious for sometimes messing up dual boot Windows / Linux setups during Windows updates.

It depends a bit what exactly has happened but it can help, yes. It would be worth a Try when it should happen.

If you have your dual boot both OS Zorin OS and Windows installed on the same system disk both OS share the same EFI Boot. It could help to backup your EFI boot partition with the Disks Tool.

You can choose with a left-click context menu "Partition Image Create" and follow the instructions.
Then you could later restore this partition, if something got broken or windows has overwritten it.


Yes. Boot Repair disk (aka grub repair) works on dual-boot systems, and is usually called upon on dual-boot systems to solve their boot issues.

But sometimes the boot repair shows "nvram locked", and then a boot repair is not possible. This happened to me on my Dualboot system with Windows.