Apparently this is still common - I have a brand new Surface 4 laptop that came with Windows 11 Pro preinstalled, and I decided to dual boot.
Of course, at the first system update, Windows 11 quietly wiped out the boot loader, without so much giving a notice.
I tried the boot recovery tool provided on the Zorin 18 bootable, as described here:
It doesn't work.
Just spits out some errors, something about --no-nvram and "exit code 1" - I looked this up and there's a whole story about discharging your BIOS by unplugging the computer and holding the power button, which obviously isn't going to work on a laptop, no idea.
This is what did work:
- Boot from a USB stick
sudo su -fdisk -land note:- The boot volume name, e.g.
/dev/xxx - The EFI partition name, e.g.
/dev/xxx1 - The Windows partition name, e.g.
/dev/xxx3 - The Linux partition name, e.g.
/dev/xxx5
- The boot volume name, e.g.
mount /dev/xxx5 /mnt(the Linux partition)mount /dev/xxx1 /mnt/boot/efi(the EFI partition)for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do mount -B $i /mnt$i; donechroot /mntmount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivarsgrub-install /dev/xxx(the boot volume)update-grub
So basically reinstalling the boot loader, I guess?
Sounds much simpler and very logical - I don't know what the recovery tool is for, but this probably would have been much simpler advice.
I'm just posting this here for posterity - someone might want to update that article, as it is not useful. I can see other people have posted here in the past who also couldn't get it to work.
Anyhow, I'm sure future me will find this post useful when Windows randomly decided to bork my laptop again. Microsoft really is dead scared of a little competition, aren't they? 
