Hi everyone, I am new to Linux, and just installed Zorin for the first time on my 2012 MacBook. I am not sure what happened, but it appears somehow my new Zorin install unmounted my main Mac HD after the 17.2 update. (!!) Thank God my problem has been fixed, but I want to post my experience on here to 1) help others who may find themselves in the same situation 2) to make people aware of this problem (hello Zorin!), and 3) to ask if someone on here could tell me what went wrong?
Here is what happened:
Last weekend I installed Zorin (dual boot) on my 2012 MacBook (running Catalina), following the instructions on the Zorin website. (Yes I checked the system requirements first, and with 8G of Ram and 256G of storage (only about 120 of which was in use) thought I was good to go.) It went ok and the instructions were pretty clear except for the part where you are supposed to partition space during the install—that was definitely not clear for a noob and even though I had already made a partition for Linux pre install, it led me to believe I needed to partition again. So I did, and ended up putting Zorin on a 70G sub-partition out of the 140G original Linux partition I made. The rest of the install went off alright as far as I can tell, no error messages or anything. I Booted back into OSX and everything was there so I thought things were good and booted back into Zorin. I installed drivers and the 17.2 update and that is when things went downhill. After letting that update finish and tweaking a few things, I shut down my MacBook so I could restart it and check to make sure REFind was working. Upon restarting, I found REFind was ok and Zorin was there but my OSX was GONE—No image to boot from, nothing. I shut my MacBook down and hit the option key at startup but it booted into Zorin. I tried to boot into safe mode but it went into Zorin also. I tried recovery mode but it too was gone, it only went into Apple internet recovery. I was horrified. On Apple internet recovery I went into disk utility and it only showed 2 disks which were both unmounted and grayed out: disk03 (which was Zorin), and disk02 which is what should have been my Mac HD & HD data. I couldn’t mount disk02 or do anything with it, even Time Machine would not work because Recovery could not see a disk to back up to. Fortunately, I had made a recent Time Machine back up so I knew all my data was not lost. After hours of reading (and much distress) I came to learn my main Mac HD partition had somehow been edited and unmounted. Upon looking at it in both Recovery and Zorin, it was showing FFFFFF… instead of the alpha-numeric sequence that should have been there. I booted back into Zorin again hoping I could do something there. I went into Disks and found an option to edit the Mac HD partition from FFFFF….to Apple Core data, so I tried that, but it just made my disk completely disappear when I checked it in Recovery again. I went back into Zorin and tried to edit it again, this time to APFS, and by God’s mercy that worked! I was able to boot into OSX and MacBook now recognizes my HD again! REFind is gone, but I can boot into Mac via the option key at startup and everything is back and seems to function normally. So it looks like I am good now (Thank God!!!!)…..very happy I did not have to take my laptop to the Apple store or completely wipe my Mac.
I may uninstall Zorin later, as it appears it is not very compatible with my old MacBook and I do not want to go through this again!
Best I can figure, somehow Zorin changed my HD format out of APFS.
Like I said, hope this helps someone and if anyone has any ideas about how this could have happened I would love to know!