Disaster averted

[Beerislife]

I'm thinking of selling this Lenovo desktop and building myself something
around an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D for X-Plane 12, so I downloaded a Windows
recovery image from Lenovo to burn to a USB stick!

It took about 10 minutes to download the image and TWO hours to burn
it to a 32Gb stick!

When it was done I plugged it into this Lenovo machine to see if it would
start! Big mistake, it started just fine and I exited at the first install
option (language) and rebooted.

My system booted into maintenance mode!

I pulled out a live Linux stick and booted into it but lost video output.
The system was trying to display from the built-in video and not the AMD
card I bought recently!

Some of my BIOS settings were changed and probably corrupt so I flashed
the BIOS again with a live BIOS ISO image I had already from Lenovo!

Two of my disk partitions were now owned by root! I fixed that with
the live image and rebooted back to Neon!

It was 1C outside but I was sweating!

Never boot a Windows disk unless you intend to use it!

[kc1di]

Glad you figured it out quickly

[jlittle]

... TWO hours to burn it to a 32Gb stick!

After that, I'd be very suspicious of that stick. I expect burning time to be proportional to the iso size.

I prefer copying to my proven Ventoy stick anyway, making sure the copy completes before I proceed further.

[Beerislife]

Nah, it's fine! I was using Windows 11 Pro on an N100 PC and using the USB2 port! Maybe I was exaggerating when I said two hours but it took longer than making three Linux sticks and installing and configuring them one by one to test them! The Lenovo Recovery Media Creator is really slow!