Last night I did a routine restart for a non-system update, and I got the dreaded black screen with the blinking cursor in the upper left. I have had this before, and it seems to involve the computer somehow misplacing the operating system.

As before I went through a lot of repair things, boot record rebuilds, settings, and other foof. At some point, it recovered. I have no idea why. The last thing I did wasn’t the same thing that fixed it last time, and the thing that fixed it last time didn’t work this time.

At some point, a Windows system becomes so eccentric you have to scrape off the system drive and re-install everything. But not today.