27 Hours In Terminal Hell
When you do the simple, everyday tech chores you’ve done a hundred times, you don’t expect one sleepy click to go nuclear. You don’t think, “today’s the day I obliterate my entire system.” But that’s exactly what I did, and this is how a single mistake detonated into twenty-seven hours of chaos, command-line triage, and the downright stubborn refusal to let two laptops die on my watch.
Hour Zero — The Fatal Click
“Oh no. Oh no…”
I kept repeating it like I could rewind reality by chanting. Then the truth landed like a gut punch: my “safe little task” had just rammed an iceberg, and I was the lookout who missed it.
I was flashing a Pop!_OS recovery USB with Rufus—standard stuff—except I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t select the USB. I selected my 1TB system drive. One click. One confirmation. One progress bar. And suddenly my daily driver believed it had ~10MB total space. Black screen. Reboot. BIOS loop. No OS. No partitions. A ghost of a machine.
Panic’s useless; you can’t cry your way out of BIOS. I snapped into emergency mode.
Then I remembered an ancient backup: an ASUS E406SA I hadn’t touched in ~5 years. I dug it out like a relic, cracked it open, blew out the dust, pressed power—and it booted. Victory? Briefly. Storage check: 28.5 GB total and basically zero free. So now I had two problems: a “dead” 1TB laptop and a “barely breathing” 28GB laptop that couldn’t fit anything. This wasn’t repair anymore. This was salvage.
I needed tiny. Enter Tiny Core Linux—a 16MB miracle with the personality of a scalpel. No GUI. No hand-holding. Just a terminal if you can get it to boot. Perfect.
Plan: use the starved 28GB laptop to download Tiny Core, flash a USB, and operate on the 1TB corpse.
Problem: “Insufficient space available.” Of course.
So I went scorched-earth on the mini laptop. Uninstalls. Purges. Nothing left—and still no space. Time to raid the underbelly: shadow copies, caches, hibernation file—gone. Byte by byte I clawed out enough room to grab the ISO, burn the USB, and finally boot the main laptop into Tiny Core’s terminal.
Now the surgery. No UI. No safety nets. Just the blade:
fdisk
lsblk
dd
parted
mklabel gpt
mkfs.ext4
One typo and I’d salt the earth. But careful, methodical, relentless—I rebuilt the disk’s foundations block by block. And then the moment: clean mount, no errors. Pulse found.
Tiny Core gave me life support on the 1TB machine—a heartbeat but no limbs: no desktop, no tools, no internet. The cruel paradox: I needed the internet to fetch drivers, but I needed drivers to get the internet.
Meanwhile, my USB sticks were dropping like flies; four died mid-flash. I had one left—and it was the only thing keeping the 1TB machine steady. If I wiped it to move drivers, I’d lose my access. Boxed in.
Answer: evolve the rescue laptop so it could carry a bigger distro. But first, I had to starve Windows of its bloat.
The purge, executed like pulling fuses mid-flight:
cleanmgr /sagerun:1
Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup
vssadmin delete shadows /all /quiet
powercfg -h off
The result: 2.31 GB free. Not much—but enough for Linux Lite. And enough to push this operation into the next phase.
With the 1TB drive stable and mounting cleanly, it was time to rebirth the rescue laptop. Not “reset.” Rebuild.
I loaded Linux Lite on the survivor USB and executed the digital equivalent of detonating the foundations:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
No prompts. No mercy. Obliteration by zeros—partitions, boot sectors, ghosts—all gone. Then: a clean, full Linux Lite install on the 28GB laptop. It booted beautifully. Almost perfect—one final gremlin remained, coiled and waiting: Wi-Fi.
The newly rebuilt 28GB laptop saw my hotspot (POCO M4 Pro). I entered the password.
“Incorrect password.” Try again. “Incorrect.” Again. Again. An infinite loop.
I wasn’t mistyping. The logs told the truth:
WPA: 4-Way Handshake failed – pre-shared key may be incorrect
RSN: Failed to configure GTK
CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED reason=WRONG_KEY
Classic ath9k on legacy hardware colliding with modern WPA2. Not a you problem—a driver/protocol problem. I tried the usual: purge profiles, bounce NetworkManager, reload modules—same loop. If software won’t solve it, go deeper.
BIOS time. I performed the exorcism:
Disable Secure Boot
Enable CSM (Compatibility Support Module)
Restore factory defaults, then save & reboot
Desktop loads. Click Connect.
Instant handshake. Bars fill. Online. The demon is gone.
After twenty-seven hours of escalation, triage, and terminal-level surgery:
1TB main laptop — disk architecture rebuilt, partitions restored, clean mount, fully functional again.
28GB rescue laptop — Windows replaced with a clean, fast Linux Lite that now talks to Wi-Fi like it never had beef with 2025.