I am also having installing Zorin 17.1 on a refurbished HP4530pro laptop running Windows 10. I was installing from a SanDisk 128G SD card. I had been looking at Zorin OS running off the SD card. And decided to do a dual boot install. Unfortunately I just clicked on the install button in the Zorin screen. I let the installer decide how it wanted to set-up the portions. After a long wait I got a pop-up saying that it couldn't install programs, with a installer crash error. It also said something about compiling an error report that I could used to report the error. Then to close the window. However the whole thing hung up at that point. I ended up letting it run overnight. But in the morning the busy icon was still there. So I powered down. Unfortunately When I powered up, it said boot device not found please install operating system. I repeatrd this a couple more times. With no luck. I tried everything I could find on-line to repair things. But nothing worked. I then used the the SD card to boot back into Zorin. I used files, disks, and GParted. It looked like the hard drive had been partitioned for the Zorin install. But nothing was loaded into the Linux partitions. And the Windows partition seemed to be intact. I tried to find something in the App store with no luck. A web search turned up test disk for Linux. I got it extracted, but couldn't figure out how to run the program. The only thing another search turned up was how to use the terminal. And I was to frustrated by this point to want to revert to the command line. Which is what delayed my trying Linux for several decades. I had rarely resorted to the command line since my MSDOS days
G'Day @Starlord.ra , Welcome to the community!
Firstly let me say that we have had many people using an SD card to install & have many faults.
So in saying that i would suggest using a USB Stick, as your bootable device or a DVD. Even the USB Sticks get warm/hot when installing...
The SD Card's get very hot & causing installation issue's.
Did you revert/change back your BIOS driver priority order?
From what i read, it doesn't seem like the installation was successful? If not then you'll need to recover your pc back to windows & start the Dual boot installation again.
Hope this helps.
Hi, dual booting is best done by shrinking your notebook's C:\ drive using Windows own disk management first before attempting to install. The other thing to consider is whether you want GRUB to be the bootloader or use NeoSmart's EasyBCD boot manager, this latter option does not work with Windows 11. Take a look at my tutorial video here:
Read some basic pre-installation advice here: Before you install
Ouch.
With any luck it decided to take a bit of the hard drive from windows and use it for linux - keeping the windows partition intact. Or it chose to do nothing at all to the partition table.
So the first thing that you are going to want to do is to see what your hard drive now looks like.
Fire up Zorin off of you SD card again and at the "Z" icon type in "term" in the search box and hit enter.
Now type in "sudo fdisk /dev/sdx" where "x" can be "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", etc
Ignore any dire warnings about the disk being mounted. We are only going to peruse, but not modify anything (yet).
Here's my /dev/sdb:
/dev/sdb1 34 32767 32734 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdb2 32768 1367220267 1367187500 651.9G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sdb3 1367222272 1429721087 62498816 29.8G Linux swap
/dev/sdb4 1429721088 1691439837 261718750 124.8G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdb5 1691441152 1953523711 262082560 125G Linux filesystem
Hopefully you will see both Microsoft as well as linux filesystems.
Please post what you find.
As I see it, these are the three likely outcomes of your failed installation:
Scenario #1
You have both a MS and linux partitions. Good. Now you need to fix the boot loader. The easiest way to do this is to install linux again (be it Zorin or some other distro), In the installer choose use your existing partitions by selecting "Something Else" in the installer.
Select the Ext4 as your "/" partition, "swap" as your swap partition, and optionally your Windows partition using something like "/home/your user name/Win_C as the mount point for your Windows data. (you can always edit this in your /etc/fstab as I had to).
Scenario #2
Would be an unchanged partition with only a MS filesystem on it.
My advice here is to either use Easeus in Windows to partition your drive, or buy a second drive and use it exclusively for linux. You can use Gparted in linux (it's what the installer uses), but if you have an installation failure, you will be back to a no-boot situation.
Scenario #3
A linux only partition. Umm, welcome to linux?
Already tried that it didn't work. And in trying to fix the boot order. I ended up not being able to boot anything. Before doing that I had tried fixing things after booting zorin from a flash drive. That didn't work. I tried DiskGenus, clonezilla, and other software for repairing HDD. Nothing worked, all windows files appear to be intact.
Is there any way to get Windows 10 installation media to USB thumb drive to run a boot repair?
@swarfendor437 Boot Repair Disk should be available from ZorinOS bootable USB. Any particular reason to ask for Win10 media?
He can't boot into Windows eother. Does boot repair work for Windows? Now you have just triggered my memory for another possible solution, Ultimate Boot CD. I have used the latter when I could not boot into Windows in the past.
Yes. It should be independant of any OS ref: boot-repair-disk / Home / Home
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