Yes I fell prey to gaming in Windows again… and after letting it do its thing I lost control of my refind EFI boot setup. What a drag to fix it…

  • Try to find a working boot disk, realize you gave them all away to your boss at the job where you just got laid off…
  • Download yet another live iso and set up yet another new boot disk
  • Boot with it, dealing with all the UNBELIEVABLE ubuntu issues with nvidia cards, years later and I’m still typing this BULLSHIT: nouveau.noaccel=1
  • Download refind, find the old efi partition by sheer luck poking around /dev/disk/by-label/… even tho all the rest of the partitions lost their labels… WHAEEEVER
  • Watch refind FAIL as you realize you booted the USB in non-EFI mode
  • Go back to work on the Ubuntu boot disk so it contains refind, only to find that it mounts read-only no matter what you do, and gparted just UFKCING WILL NOT WORK WITH IT, telling you it has the wrong size sectors or some such shit… after an hour of that, slink back to manually downloading refind every time you live-boot….
  • Attempt to boot the live USB into UEFI mode…. but STUPIDLY change some fuckign BIOS legacy mode to standard and find that you’ve BRICKED YOUR MACHINE… finally realizing your ownly option is to find a rusty nail (literally) to pop out the CMOs battery and get a reset… lifeyears lost on that one
  • Go through the ubuntu boot voodoo to find that the internet is not reachable any more… because… wait for it… systemd is fucking with you once again.  Turns out the clock reset, so every @*($U@# DNS request was being denied by systemd-resolved due to “certificate expiration” errors or some such horseshit… so fix the clock, MUST BE PRECISE or it will keep failing, and restart systedm-resolved to miraculously find the internet working again FUCK YOU SYSTEMD FOREVER FUCK YOU RED HAT FUCK YOU ALL
  • Download refind… again… mount EFI… again… install refind… again…. reboot and pray.
  • Discover that windows has really… REALLY… trashed your partitions.

Calgone, take me away… time for a run…