thesqudge wrote:
I have a usb drive that I have setup as a Windows 11 bootable external drive to use on my MacBook Pro 2019.
I may have been over confident in my abilities because I had the bright idea to also install linux (Zorin) on it as well. I used disk management in windows to create a partition, all seemed fine.
Using Windows to modify the partition layout of a Windows boot drive is the correct way of doing things.
I then installed linux, I thought I messed up the macOS boot loader because it was booting into the Zorin boot loader only,
The Zorin installer just made Zorin the default boot option by configuring the PRAM (aka NVRAM). You could easily have used the macOS Startup Disk System Setting to change the default to macOS again or Windows.
Even performing a PRAM Reset would have removed Zorin as the default boot option. Normally the internal boot drive will be selected by default with all things being equal after a PRAM Reset.
Usually the Linux bootloader will be placed on the same drive with the other Linux OS files/partitions unless the user tells the Linux installer to use a different drive for the bootloader. In fact the Linux bootloader will reside on the hidden EFI (aka ESP) partition. And on that EFI/ESP partition there will usually be a folder with the distribution's name or perhaps just a generic "boot" folder. Windows will have one named "windows" or is it "microsoft" (it has been a while)?
If you are booting multiple operating systems, you may want to check out rEFInd which is a graphical boot manager. The rEFInd installer is just a shell script which places the rEFInd bootloader onto the hidden EFI partition and configures the PRAM/NVRAM to default to booting to the rEFInd bootloader/graphical boot manager.
so after getting back into my Mac I decided to erase the linux partition, and remove the linux boot loader. This brought back my macOS boot loading screen and allowed me to choose between Macos or windows again.
So you used macOS to erase the Linux partition on the external Windows boot drive?
However, now when I choose the windows partition, it just goes black and restarts the computer. I've done some searching online and have found some similar scenarios but no answer. I've read that partitioning the drive through windows rather than macOS is what caused the issue, not sure.
I don't think Windows did this. If you used Disk Utility to erase the Linux partition, then that is what likely caused the problem. macOS is just as bad or perhaps even worse than Windows in this respect only because Disk Utility is a terrible app. Disk Utility can do some strange things sometimes.
Is there a way to have my MacBook load the windows partition on this usb drive again? I've attached a screenshot of diskutil list for an idea of what I'm seeing.
If you can boot the Windows installer, perhaps it can fix the Windows boot issue. Unfortunately I have no idea how to access those special boot repair options in the Win10/11 installers. I know the older Windows installers had an option to boot into a special mode where there was an option to attempt to automatically repair Windows' boot issues.
Chances are if you know what the UUID of that partition should be (or its partition code/type), then there are utilities which can change it. It has been a long time since I tried to fix Windows' boot issues or even seen the various Windows' partitions (I never paid much attention to it even then). IIRC, there is usually a Windows "Recovery" partition. Probably changing the partition type to match the other "Microsoft Data" partitions would be all that is needed.
I have suggested a macOS command line utility to modify the partition type to assist another user, but I don't have that information handy (it is complicated). I usually just use a Linux command line utility which is able to change the partition type more easily than the macOS utility. Again, I haven't done that in over a decade, but I think it was just the Linux "fdisk" utility.
