For 14 years I have been playing with fire, and I finally got scorched.
My damn near 15 year windows installation got corrupted this weekend, and I'm sad about it. To clarify, I bought W7 Pro in 2012. Did a hardware upgrade in 2013 with a new motherboard and CPU. Took the free W10 upgrade in 2015. Cloned it later that year to a new drive. Cloned it again in 2018 to another new drive complete with a new motherboard and CPU. Did the W11 upgrade. In 2023 I again upgraded to a new motherboard and CPU. 2024 I cloned it AGAIN onto a larger drive. Then finally over the weekend I transferred the drive to a rebuild of the previous hardware while the current hardware is getting the water cooling treatment, and....boot files are corrupted. Could boot into safe mode, but couldn't repair and rebuild the bootloader. Had to reset windows. I'm a bit miffed because that was a fantastic run on a fresh windows installation from 2012 spanning multiple hardware upgrades, OS upgrades, and drive clonings. Sad it had to go that way.
A bit of a blessing in disguise. I've had a bootable USB with SteamOS sitting there for a while and maybe it's time to say farewell to Windows.