My apologies if this has been dealt with, but I'm using a Samsung tablet that evaporates search function when I try to use it!

Using a USB stick with Serena linux mint on it to boot a partitioned but empty drive, I decided to wipe the drive entirely using

dd if=/dev/zero of =/dev/sda

But things came unstuck and the system froze completely. It is an Acer E5-511 64bit laptop with EUFI and secure boot and legacy boot.

I tried various boot disks, both linux and Win 10, but panicked, and finished up with just a grub rescue prompt. But none of the partitions have a filesystem and it doesn't have a boot sector either.

grub rescue > ls
(hd0) (hd0, msdos1) (hd1) where hd1 is the USB stick I was using

It gets worse

grub rescue > ls (hd0)
(hd0): Filesystem is unknown

grub rescue > ls (hd1) tv
(hd1): Filesystem is unknown

grub rescue > ls (hd0, msdos1)
(hd0, msdos1): Filesystem is unknown

Is there any way out of this hole I have dug myself into??

Sda is generally the main hard drive where windows and probably your Linux was installed on. So basically it looks like you formatted everything On the bright side you get to do a clean reinstall. If you saved your product key for windows you can download and install for free, otherwise you'll have to buy another licence

What does this mean - every boot disk you tried went into a kernel panic ?.
Or you panicked ?.

From your Mint USB simply format the internal disk as gpt, then do a UEFI install (I'd turn safeboot off) - it should create a EFI partition for you, and all will be well.

Does bios see the drive correctly still?

In legacy mode do you have the ability to find the drive in any OS?

Since W10 fails then it may have to do with the ability of the OEM and uefi data. Not sure how much could be on an OEM drive. As far as I know you should be able to use some tools uefi if all is OK.

I meant I panicked. But the system isn't that well either. If I try to boot with any dvd with windows I get "no bootable drive" graphic. With linux it goes straight to grub rescue prompt, with or without a dvd selected as boot disk.

On reflection it may be a dvd or dvd drive issue. The dvd drive was refusing to burn the latest Serena Linux Mint download, saying to use compatible media. But this was media I had used in the past. The dvd drive tries to boot dvd but doesn't succeed. The USB iso I'd been using may have been may have been corrupted by system freeze.

So, given the state of my hard drive no boot sector, no partitions or data, it should still be bootable with a boot dvd, if media and dvd drive are working properly?

I'll head to library and check out media, make a USB .iso if I can.

Yes it should "just work" - however ... (there's always a "however").
There are stories that some vendors build their EFI firmware to expect (demand) Microsft loader. It has to be on the disk. Similar used to happen with some old (Phoenix ?) BIOS setups too. PITA.

Shouldn't affect a USB boot though you would hope.

Thanks for reply. Acer drives for this laptop are problematic in windows as well, registry issues. So it could be a driver/ firmware issue. I've attempted to use cdrom with tiny brushes to clean drive.
But it hasn't made any difference. It starts spinning, but that is it.
I've used usb.iso of Serena to boot just before all this went south. Worked fine except for start of dvd issues. Android tablet reckons my win10.iso and serena.iso are corrupted, but sees a rescue.iso file just fine, but it is not a bootable usb.

Hope I can create usb.iso at library. Once again thanks for assistance.