Ok ok. So, I installed Zorin to dual boot a while back and it came with an option to dual boot with windows, making a boot manager. But I couldn’t get my wife adapter to work. So, I deleted it from the windows partition manager. But now the boot manager it made won’t let me get into windows. I can’t wipe the hard drive. And all it brings up is grub rescue!!
This is why I always encourage those who are new to any flavor of Linux to install it on an external drive, then just change the boot order by hitting F9 or whichever key your computer uses... once you're comfortable with Linux, you'll either wipe Windows and install to the internal drive; or you can set up a Grub menu to boot either Windows or Linux.
If you cannot get Windows to boot by hitting F9 or whatever key your computer uses to change the boot order, then on another computer, download the Win10 PE .ISO file and 'burn' it to a USB stick... boot that USB stick into Windows 10 PE and repair the installed Windows bootloader.
It took a few different try’s but it does look like it was working! Thank you
My advice to any Windows user is to backup critical data before installing any other OS. In my video tutorial of dual-booting the non-traditional way (Windows 7 with Zorin OS 9) I state early on to create a system repair disc. For Windows 10 there is a useful tutorial here:
Windows 10 and 11 tutorial to create rescue/repair disc:
So if not done so already, make that repair disc now.
You should also invest in additional tools such as:
Hiren's Boot CD https://www.hirensbootcd.org/
Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ubcd4win.com/
and System Rescue Disc https://www.system-rescue.org/
and for any OS, complete system backup:
and in terms of GNU/Linux invoke Timeshift and if saving snapshots to external device, create an Ext4 partition as it will not read snapshots saved to NTFS - so external devices should be split between two partitions - Ext4 and NTFS if using Timeshift. If just doing simple backups which is what I tend to do, then just copy /home folder to external device, ensuring Ctrl+ H has been selected to show hidden files which store application settings - I usually do this to an NTFS formatted Hard Disk Drive.
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