story The Windows Boot Manager saved my life.

[ImAlsoRan]

Disclaimer: I shared this story on Reddit, and wanted to share it with you guys as well. Seeing as we can all learn from my mistake.

Anything red means it was for the original community (PCMR) I posted it on.

 

Buckle in, this is a long one.

 

Okay, so if you've ever gotten a new SSD, reinstalled Windows, or have a dual boot, you've most likely seen the Windows Boot Manager. You know, the one that looks like this. Most people want to get rid of it, but this thing literally saved me days of reinstalling everything.

 

This story starts like most on this sub, with somebody being an idiot. That idiot was me. I love Vista. The part of my life I really spent interest in computers was during the Vista era, and my parents had a Vista laptop. I love the Aero glass UI, and wanted it on Windows 10. Now I know, there's Win8AeroGlass, but I couldn't stand the watermark. No free advertising on my PCs (apart from the countless number of stickers on my MacBook, obviously).

 

I'm pretty deep into the customization world, and have theme patchers. I found a .msstyles file for Aero glass and I tried it out. That's when it all broke down.

 

My PC started freaking out, then went to a black screen. Mouse still worked, but no Ctrl-Alt-Del, or anything like that. Crap.

 

I quickly went to my phone to Google the solution, and there was! Go into the Windows Recovery Environment > Troubleshooting > Advanced Options > Command Prompt and delete the troublesome themes and replace them with the working Windows 10 one. Perfect! All I need to do is grab my USB, and... crap! My flash drive was currently used by some footage. And the footage was only on that flash drive. Plus, I couldn't even install Windows 10 onto it anyway because my brother wasn't letting me use my laptop MacBook was currently occupied.

 

I decided to take a chance and hit my reset button to see if restarting would fix it. Long story short: It didn't.

 

I restarted because now the only thing that appeared was the black screen. No login or anything. Great.

 

But that's when I saw it. On the boot manager. Change defaults or other options.

 

I clicked it, and hooray! I got to command prompt, and deleted the files, booted into safe mode to change the theme back, and... you've gotta be kidding me!

 

Every attempt to login booted me back to the login screen. Great.

 

I went back to command prompt, and it turns out that I didn't delete the resource folder. I did, booted to safe mode, and... I've never been so happy to see that copy of Castle Crashers on my desktop.

I changed the theme, booted into normal Windows, and here I am, 15 minutes later. I'm not kidding, the first thing I did when it booted (other than fixing a couple things) was go to Reddit to tell this story.

TD;LR: If you use Windows, use System Restore/Make backups and prepare for the worst.

[TetraSky]

This is why you should create backups, #5125.

 

It's great that you've managed to fixed it up without much problem. Though you really should've kicked your brother off your own laptop.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

tbh I don't get why people liked Aero. It slowed things down and looks really ugly imo

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

27 minutes ago, ImAlsoRan said:

My flash drive was currently used by some footage.

It never hurts to have some extra flash drives laying around.  Don't be like me though, I have a Flash drive hoarding problem.