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After trying to remove Zorin OS from a dual boot machine (Win10, Zorin), W10 cannot boot anymore and goes directly to a BIOS memory scan.

This machine has Windows 10 Pro, version installed this year with its updates. Can I fix MBR using a different installation media of W10 than the installed right now?,

for example W10 home, W10 pro 2020 version, W10 2020 in other language.

Those are the only disks burned on DVD I have available now, since don't have easy access to another Windows 10 machine. Thanks in advance

Update

In boot options have this

UEFI boot options

When I enter in Windows boot manager, runs a memory scan and when finishes appears this enter image description here

Ger Cas
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2 Answers2

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The MBR installed by Windows has one main task: find the 'active' partition and jump to its VBR. This doesn't depend on the OS language nor license.

(It shouldn't depend much on the version either – AFAIK, all Windows versions since Vista have use same MBR contents, but you could probably get it working even with a Syslinux mbr.bin, or a Win98 MBR or a MS-DOS MBR. It's only the GRUB MBR that's a bit of an outlier here.)

The system partition's VBR does a bit more (it has to actually find the BOOTMGR file in NTFS), but that also works the same way across all Windows license levels.

grawity
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If you're seeing UEFI boot, then your disk is probably in GPT format, not MBR. In addition, you might have damaged the EFI partition while removing Zorin OS.

I suggest to use exactly the same Windows boot media as that of the installed Windows, to do the following:

  1. Run a Startup Repair, and if it didn't help,
  2. Repair Install of Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade.

It is important that the second method should find your Windows 10 partition on the disk. If the partition isn't found, then it also was too damaged to be recognizable.

In this case, your Windows setup is gone - you should do a clean install of Windows. If you need to save some data from the Windows partition, use a Linux Live USB to do that.

In the case of a clean install, it's safer to just format the disk and install Windows to the Unallocated area (which should be the entire disk).

harrymc
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