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TIFU by wiping the operating system from my computer while being a tier 3 technical engineer.

TLDR I tried to transfer my OS to a new drive, wiped the old one, and totally destroyed my computer’s ability to boot when I really should know better.

I do advanced troubleshooting for a living. I’ve been working in the field of technology for over 6 years and I have a bachelors in software development. If the saying is true about needing 10,000 hours of doing something to master it, I’ve gone well beyond that threshold.

But that didn’t stop me from breaking my $2000 computer! :)

I got a new M.2 NVMe SSD for my gaming laptop and I wanted to move Windows over to it because I had read that boot times are faster compared to SATA SSDs. So my laptop has 3 drives now: the original it came with, another SSD harvested from my previous gaming laptop, and now this new one.

I did an entire system backup (thank god) and then I cloned the original disk to the new one. When I went into the BIOS to change the boot order however, I saw 3 identical Boot Manager options. Because at one point Windows had been installed on all 3 disks and thus all had the system files partition.

I picked one at random and logged in to check — disk manager seemed to confirm that I had moved everything successfully. I saw all the flags on the new SSD that imply it’s now the main active one. Cool!! I went ahead and totally wiped my other two disks.

Oops.

Next time I booted up I got NO BOOTABLE DEVICE errors all over the place. Crap. Good thing I backed up and know how to make a recovery flash drive. Easy fix right ?

Wrong. My next fuckup was accidentally buying a 2.0 USB flash drive. Incompatible with my BIOS that only supports 3.0. Great.

Next day I get the right kind of flash drive. But nope! Now I got the type of partition formatting wrong. Fixed that. Next fuckup — failing to realize that I couldn’t copy the Windows 10 ISO to the drive because Fat32 doesn’t support files over 4 GB and the ISO is like 5.7 GB. Finally googled it after several unsuccessful attempts and was not pleased. Ended up having to use 7zip to break the ISO into smaller volumes that Windows put back together when installing.

Everything is back up and running now, and I sure did learn a lot about Windows installation and recovery, but damn. That’s two days of fail after fail — and I’m supposed to be a genius at this shit!

So hey, if you ever fuck up your computer and feel dumb, just know that even the experts fuck up too.

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