Interesting. I suppose I’ll see if it happens again, luckily not too big a deal as Windows was more a convenience for a couple utilities I use, already found a Linux friendly way for one of them thanks to it borking itself recently. If they’re intentionally doing that and giving me an excuse to rid myself entirely of Windows, I guess I won’t complain too much ahaha. I just chalked it up to the usual Windows shenanigans

Hah, I had written then deleted a part because the comment was already pretty long saying it almost has the same energy as “my spare yacht” at the moment. Reaaaally glad I had the foresight/luck with timing I did on keeping components around. Can’t wait for some bubbles to burst

This is what I do, just a spare nvme drive thrown in an external enclosure. Rufus has an option called “windows to go” that installs the iso as opposed to making a bootable installer, and it gives an option to block Windows from overwriting local disks to avoid the boot loader issues too. Has worked quite well up until a point recently where it just refused to boot anymore with an unhelpful error despite not having been touched in months. No updates or changes since it worked before. Good ol windows…