I ran a Windows Checkdisk last week on a Thinkpad which has been successfully booting both Windows 10 and ZorinOS 17 Core, via the GRUB menu method.
We ran the Checkdisk because there were file/folder inconsistencies inside Windows (which blocked MS OFfice activities with their bad file locked issues). So, yay, the checkdisk removed the erroneous files and directory entries.
And Very Bad, it decided it did not like the Grub and Zorin boot option process, so it took over the boot process. Now the computer ONLY boots immediately into Windows.
There is no more display of the Grub OS choices screen.
I have run the Boot-Repair, both as a downloaded app in a Ubuntu LTS live boot drive, and also I made a dedicated Boot-Repair bootable flash drive (using the release from 2023-07 which was the most recent I could find). I have run it several times and while it states that it has done something, the GRUB menu never comes back. The only clue I have is that its final end of process, Boot-Repair says to be sure to set the Zorin line in the startup file.
It's message was: Please make your UEFI boot in the ZorinOS 17.2 entry (nvme0n1p1/efi/ubuntu/grubx64.efi file)
No other special instructions showed after it finished it supposed repair. just the too-cryptic one I listed.
So, I do not know how I can do that from Windows, as I can't boot into the Zorin -- or even what exactly it is telling me to do.
I did do the paste report step which lists the Boot-Repair results:
https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/Xt3hbcD4mw/
I can see from GParted in several of the Linux boot recovery drives I have (including Parted Magic), that the Linux/Zorin volumes are all still there with approximately the amount of used space we expect. So I'm just trying to figure out how to get the GRUB dual-boot option working again.
I tried to do a Rescuezilla restore of just the boot partitions, but that did not seem to help. I also tried the O&O Disk Image which we've been running from Windows, and which has been backing up all the various volumes including linux zorin, but discovered that the O&O restore process can only restore the Windows drives (FAT32 & NTFS) and not any linux or whereever GRUB was. I did restore just the Windows 260 MB boot partition, which was from BEFORE the bad Checkdisk, but that did not bring back GRUB dual boot.
I booted from the SuperGrub repair tool, but that looked way too complicated and nothing was clear about what to do. So I just looked at its report, which seems useful, took a lot of mobile phone pictures and transcribed that.
It is rather long so I'm thinking I'll paste it into a separate entry or is there a better way of putting up a 80+ line text log file?
(Fast Startup is OFF)
I agree that the output is quite daunting, but it's just a list of possible bootable systems it could find. You can just hit Enter on any of them to try booting it.
