Could be the HDD went down the drain. Happens to me a couple of times.
If you are booting from the usb, and using the live image to check gparted, why isn't your usb visible in gparted? What size is your usb, out of curiosity? If the 1tb drive is the internal, please delete both partitions, the efi partition may be effecting your installation. Create an ntfs partition (or any other file system you don't plan on using) and format the entire drive. Then delete that partition, create a 500mb fat32, and your partitions for how you plan to install zorin (with seperate /home partition or all together) formatting as ext4. Then boot the live cd and attempt the install from within the live image using something else method. Choose the 500mb partition for grub (last choice after defining root /, and home /home partitions).
The only other thing i can think is that your drive may be on its way out. Changes after a long period of time sometimes bring to light bad sectors or a failing drive. I hope that is not the case.
Edit: The dual partition wipe is to remove any reference to the existing efi partition and any remnants of windows left behind. You can eliminate this by doing a thorough format instead of quick, but it will take the better part of half an hour or more.
It says "grub-install /dev/sda"
Try changing the grub install to the partition /dev/sda1
Before I try killing and resetting all partitions, are there any ways for me to check for bad sectors on the hard drive?
My USB is 32 GB about 28GB useable, which could account for 28GB, but I can't have a 1TB partition of a 32 GB drive...
My brain transposed as /dev/sdb.
Try going into BIOS settings and setting to Legacy instead of UEFI.
Then run your installer. Failing to install grub to sda may be due to it trying to install to MBR on UEFI system.
How am I supposed to do that when the installer is choosing for me?
This deserves an answer, but please try setting BIOS to Legacy before trying this.
To install grub to a specific location, this is done from the terminal within the Live Zorin demo with:
sudo grub-install /dev/sda1 --force
As /dev/sda is your hdd, this is likely unnecessary- and my fault for posting while multi-tasking and distracted. My brain read /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda.
I can't change the boot mode to legacy. It's greyed out again, despite having a supervisor password set. Am I forgetting something?
How am I supposed to do that when the installer is choosing for me?
That first question was for Harvey's response.
Makes you want to bang your head on a table, doesn't it?
I am running on an Acer Aspire Tower. Prior to that I was using an Acer Aspire Notebook... My sons notebook is an Acer Aspire of some other model number... and all Zorin Installations went smooth as butter.
Can you please check here:
On none of my machines have I set a Supervisor PW.
My short reprieve from work is nearly ended. Very happy to see Harvey and FrenchPress are around to help, too.
The link you gave says it's not advisable to enable legacy boot mode.
I checked the installation medium for errors, but maybe the file I burned was in some way corrupted. How do I verify the original file that I burned onto it?
Would it help if I burned a USB with Rufus instead of balenaEtcher? Everything appears to work if I boot from the USB, so I assume the USB itself is good...
1 Like
YES.
And I guarantee you others will voice strong approval of this message. LOL
BalenaEtcher is notorious.
Whether it will help your issue, I cannot say... This one is a bit of a stumper. But I use Unetbootin. I recommend Rufus or Unetbootin.
You can ignore that. If you are able to find out how to enable Legacy, try that.
You can verify the md5sum, but that is not the same as verifying the integrity of the write.
I came across some additional things that might prove useful.
-
During my latest installation attempt the installer said the HDD had Zorin installed on it and offered the option to install Zorin alongside Zorin.
Yet when I try to run the system without the USB, it says there is no bootable device. That suggests to me there is something wrong with the booting process (and the boot partition if there is such a thing). -
Also, I used to have the option in the boot menu to boot from USB or from the harddrive. Somewhere along the way, I've lost the latter option and it now only allows me to boot from USB, another point towards something being wrong with the boot.
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When I tried the "Something else" option in the installer and told it to write to /dev/sda1 it threw an error I can't remember. (I.e. it refused to do it).
I'll see if booting from a USB burned with a different utility makes a difference.
Otherwise, I'll try to install a different Linux distro to get the harddrive sorted and see about replacing the other one with Zorin.
I tried wiping the USB and burning the USB again. Now I'm getting errors in the diskpart manager when I'm trying to create the primary partition and I can't read or format the drive through normal means. 
I'm assuming I can't fix the boot on my laptop without my USB to boot from...
How old is your USB?
It sounds like a pre-failure symptom to me.
Check disk for Linux:
1
Right-click on the desktop and choose the "Open in Terminal" option from the menu that appears. A terminal window opens.
2
Type the following command to unmount the drive you want to check:
sudo umount /dev/sdb
Replace "/dev/sdb" with the device name for the drive you want to check.
3
Type the following command to check the drive:
sudo fsck /dev/sdb
The command may take some time to complete, depending on the size of your drive. When the process is finished, a number will be displayed. A "0" indicates that no errors were found; a "1" means that errors were found and corrected; "2" means that the system should be rebooted; and a "4" indicates that file system errors were found but could not be corrected. Any other number indicates that the utility did not run correctly.
4
Run the "fsck" command a second time if any number other than zero appears. This ensures that all errors were corrected.
5
Reboot the system or type the command "sudo mount /dev/sdb" to remount the drive.
As for the Bios option being greyed out... it isn't an option if you only have one bootable partition... or in your case, no bootable partitions. I'll do a little research to force legacy installation, but that might be determined how you write the live image to usb. Currently you have it set up for gpt and that is what it installs as. If you had set it to use legacy to write the image, that is what it'll install as. There may be a way to change this without rewriting the image... as i said, let me research it briefly.
if UEFI Secure boot is on, then only UEFI is offered. Also you may need to turn on allow USB boot or full USB access or similar setting. How you boot install media, is then how it installs.
From:
So you will have to write the image to usb, choosing mbr or legacy... whatever is offered by your image writing software (not gpt)
Freshly bought yesterday.