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...
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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.
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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.
Some Linux installer is difficult to remove form the USB. If you still have an access to Windows, it could be easier to format in Windows file manager.
I've just had a friend try to install Linux Mint on my Acer laptop system: once with my flash drive, later with one of his own. The latter managed to get an install going again, but that one froze on the same grub install section as Zorin did.
During the install I did get "Install alongside Zorin", so the system thought it was installed even though nothing was bootable anymore on the HDD itself.
At this point I feel I have ruled out the USB as the source of the problem since another drive can't install either. On the other hand, I've done so many different things now that it is hard to determine what had an impact and what didn't.
I used diskpart because the Windows file manager refused to admit there was even a drive inserted...
You can try this small utility from HP. It is very old but still works fine in Windows 10. It salvaged a numerous USBs for me.
https://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-Storage-Format-Tool/3000-2094_4-10974082.html
To me (and I could be wrong), all of this points to the HDD itself as being the likely culprit. You have had the same problem repeat multiple times on this drive. You have tried more than one USB with more than one burned image to the same result.
You are not using Nvidia. I have installed Zorin on several Acer Aspires and I gather so has member FrenchPress- this implies that the base BIOS settings and motherboard (Unless damaged) should not be the issue.
You might try Boot Repair as linked above- just to see what happens (Because it is currently suggestion Zorin installed but won't boot to it). The initial Partition Management showed nearly 24 gigs used and I ... still... wonder about that Windows Lock on the drive.
The EFI partition (521megs, I think...) may be corrupted. This partition can be recreated and that, too, is worth a shot.
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It really sounds like that drive is about to fail. The partitions installing, but with errors, says something exists you can't access.... all the symptoms of a failing drive. My acer aspire behaved similarly when the drive failed after 6 years, western digital i think. Anywho, you are probably looking at installing a new hard drive or ssd. I'm sorry you had to find it this way, but it would not have been long in windows either. I'd attempt to reinstall the efi partition, don't format the root partition, and see if it results in something different. Otherwise expect to get a new drive.
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