42 points
*
Honestly don’t even remember, but it was in my peak “know enough to be dangerous” days in college. I almost certainly didn’t have to go that nuclear to fix it, but that’s what I did.
Take 2 of Arch, after that wipe was completed, went pretty well. It revived an old piece of shit laptop for another few years before its motherboard gave out.
16 points
I’ll wager guess it was something to do with confusing GPT and MBR partitioning. There was a time where some BIOSs and loaders only understood or preferred one over the other, leading to weird incongruences depending on what you’re using to look at the disk. You have to actually overwrite the partition tables to get a clean start.
