Thanks mate, I appreciate you sticking with me on this. I agree it's not logical that this would be a common issue. My frustrated emotions ran away with me!
I'll give this a try. It's the "please be sure to go back in and change it back" part that fills me with a bit of dread. I'm irritatingly concerned that I'll brick the whole thing and have dumped AU$2.5k down the toilet.
lol unfortunately, I didn't even check the specs... But even if I had, I wouldn't have known the issue would have arisen... Ah well.
So, just to confirm:
Go into BIOS and set to RAID
Try the installer normally and if I can see my SSD, happy days, if not, reboot leaving it in RAID
Hit the ESC key and get into the dos-looking thing and enter the details you gave me after quiet splash
Roll the dice, and if I can see my SSD, happy days, if not, then I would shut down, take my flash drive out, startup and get into BIOS where I change RAID back to whatever it was to start with
Ah, that solved the mystery. There is this newish Acer laptop in our household which resists all my effort to install Linux on it. And yes, it dose have an NVMe SSD!
Love it. Thanks so much to you and everyone else who chipped in along the way. Seriously would have given up if it hadn't been for your help. I'll try to learn as much as I can and pay it forward when possible.
As of right now, I'm typing this message on my new Zorin OS computer and enjoying getting to know it.
Now, I get to try and make it as compatible with the machine as possible.
One thing I noticed however... is that now when I power up, it basically gives me boot options and one of those remains Windows, even though I selected to install Zorin over the top of Windows and erase everything. Any ideas there?
Yes, the Boot Record on the Motherboard shows Windows.
One simple hack you could do is, open a terminal and
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Add this line to the end of it: GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true, ctrl+x to exit, then hit the y key to say yes to save then hit the enter key to save as current configuration.
Terminal will revert to normal appearance. Update the grub:
sudo update-grub
Reboot and test. The downside of this is If you dual boot another system later, it won't show up. Don't forget that you did this LOL.
lol yeah I think I'll just leave it for now. It auto loads anyway after a while. I'm just wanting to ensure that Bill Gates isn't somewhere lurking in the dark depths of my computer. #paranoid
No, that is likely just the bootloader on its own tiny partition on the hard drive. Another trick you might do is just make that autoloader faster. Decrease the timeout time before it tires of waiting on your selection.
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
That is ten seconds wait time. You can lower this to say, Two seconds...
GRUB_TIMEOUT=2
I do not recommend making this a 1 or 0. You want that little gap there in case you ever need to boot into the Recovery menu.
Hey all! First, Zorin's been going well since I installed.
The issue I'm facing is workflow. As far as working, there are a number of programs that I'm simply either dissatisfied with the Linux-alternatives of, or I'm unwilling to learn the new way of doing things. (Lazy, I know!)
I don't know if this O/S battle is the hill I'm willing to die on, if it means a decrease in my overall productivity to a relatively substantial degree.
I haven't decided yet, but I wanted to follow-up in this channel because there's a small history of HOW I got Zorin installed in the first place, with your assistance.
I'm wondering if anyone has any pointers for what I'd need to do in order to switch back. Any insight re: bootloaders and partitions and all that stuff would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Thanks for the reply. It's dominantly Adobe CC. I mostly use Audition and Premiere Pro.
I believe I can find a workaround for Premiere relatively easily. I'm definitely not a power user.
But for Audition there are some things that I'm simply not able to reproduce without performing several other steps. (Things to do with noise reduction in audio files.)
Then, believe it or not, it's something as simple as a proper screenshot tool. I come from using Greenshot, and am now using Flameshot. Which is super powerful, and could be everything I want, but there's a bug with saving that means I must copy into another program to save it.
Seems stupid and trivial. Might be. But I get paid to eliminate inefficiencies. Since swapping to Zorin, it's been an exercise in rationalising a growing list of inefficiencies, which is driving me a bit bonkers.
This is obviously just me. My wife says I'm "special" . Not trying to deter anyone from using Zorin.
Anyway, dual booting would basically be another inefficiency I'd be explaining away. So, if you have any tips I need to be aware of to switch back I'd appreciate it.
Circling back here. After doing a bit of research into the switch back (and a bit of research into Win11) I realized how much I really didn't want to go back. I came here for a reason. So, I dug a little deeper, got VirtualBox going, and just finished some work in Adobe Audition there before shutting down, and switching back to Zorin to attend a work meeting.
That is exactly what I am doing.
My work requires some Windows applications which can be run exclusively in Windows. I use VMWare to solve that issue. In my opinion, VMWare runs Windows a little better than VirtualBox.
UPDATE! 
Love it. Thanks so much to you and everyone else who chipped in along the way. Seriously would have given up if it hadn't been for your help. 
I'll try to learn as much as I can and pay it forward when possible.
. Not trying to deter anyone from using Zorin.
