Somehow the EFI partition doesn't mount and it's impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞
super rare any form of recovery actually works. [...] 90% when windows actually breaks
To clarify I used Windows as an example of an OS which manages its own recovery. I'm absolutely not suggesting to use Windows.
I'm personally using Debian so here are some examples of official resources :
- https://wiki.debian.org/SystemRescue
- https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch08s06.en.html
- https://wiki.debian.org/RescueLive which seems to rely https://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD which seems impractical for most, instead one could consider https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apas02.en.html#howto-getting-images-usb
Honestly none of these look like practical options for somebody who is not working in IT.
Here are examples of community provided resources :
The very last one, namely Ventoy Linux Recovery Helper, looks quite interesting. Unfortunately there is literally 0 issue https://github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/issues which makes me think very few people might be actually using it. In fact while creating the first issue https://github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/issues/1 I noticed # Created by Claude for Jason in the header leading me to believe this was AI generated. Regardless of how it was done (sigh) it seems it was not thoroughly tested so I clearly would look for another alternative.