7 MONTHS TO REINSTALL WINDOWS - IF THERE IS A HELL, THIS IS ONE

A journey through the circles of Microsoft support - oh god I just wanted to update my system what have I done

In the middle of the journey of my digital life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the straight path had been lost. The error 0xC1900101 - 0x40017 appeared before me like an inscription above a gate. I read it every night. I never understood it.

A shadow emerged from the logs — Virgil, in the form of setupact.log. Follow me, he said. I will show you where the suffering begins, and where it ends. Though the end is far.

The First Circle — The Phantom Profiles

Here dwelt the innocents who had done nothing wrong, yet were trapped regardless. Valentine. Administrateur. Profiles without a soul, without an NTUSER.DAT, suspended in the limbo of a system that remembered their names but not their substance. They blocked the passage. I deleted them, gently, and moved on.

The Second Circle — The Drive Letter Conflict

A wind of perpetual confusion. The ISO, mounted on E:, took the letter that Setup needed to write WinSetupMon.sys. Access Denied, howled the storm. The souls here were tossed between letters of the alphabet for eternity, never landing anywhere useful. I extracted the ISO to C:\Win11ISO and descended further.

The Third Circle — The BCD Graveyard

174 entries. Each one a failed attempt since November 2024, crystallised into orphaned boot configuration data, accumulating like sediment at the bottom of a lake no one had thought to drain. Virgil shook his head. Each time you tried, he said, you left a ghost behind. I purged them all with a script and felt briefly victorious. I was not yet halfway down.

The Fourth Circle — The Partition Topology

Here was the true abyss. A sin committed in 2017, before I knew such sins were possible. Recovery before EFI. EFI before Windows. A layout that Windows Setup had silently despised for eight years, generating a broken bootloader at every upgrade attempt, never once saying why.

BFSVC saw the custom volume. It wrote the wrong BCD entry. The machine fell, again and again, into the same darkness, at the exact same phase — SECOND_BOOT — with the exact same expression of mechanical indifference.

Six attempts. Six descents into the same circle.

This cannot be fixed, said Virgil, from within the walls. You must destroy the city to rebuild it.

The Fifth Circle — The False Installation

I chose a new disk. I ran Setup. The EFI was placed on the wrong drive. I ran Setup again. The EFI was placed on the wrong drive again. I stood there, in the flickering light of the installer, understanding nothing, until the truth arrived like a cold wind from below: Windows always reuses an existing EFI. Always. The only way to prevent it is to physically disconnect the other drive.

Not a flag. Not a configuration. A cable. I unplugged it with my hands, like a medieval surgeon.

The third installation worked. The topology was correct: EFI → MSR → Windows → Recovery. I looked upon it and it was almost good.

The Sixth Circle — The Support Sessions

And here I must dwell longer, for this circle had four concentric rings, each one identical to the last.

In the first ring stood an agent who confirmed my licence existed, connected to my machine via Quick Assist, ran commands I had already run, and offered me a case number instead of a solution.

In the second ring stood a different agent with the same script. He asked if I had tried a clean boot. I had been clean-booting my entire existence for seven months. He gave me a different case number.

In the third ring, I pasted the full technical context — partition layout, error codes, command history — directly into the chat. The agent asked if they could take remote access to better understand the problem. Have you read anything I wrote, I asked. The agent thanked me for my cooperation.

In the fourth ring, something different happened. An agent connected. Went silent. And then the licence was active. No explanation was given. No words were exchanged beyond it's sorted. I did not ask questions. I accepted the miracle and climbed back toward the light.

The Ascent

521 GB. 688,774 files. robocopy /E /R:3 /W:5 /MT:8 /XO, running from a TempAdmin account to avoid locked files, interrupted several times, restarting each time without complaint — the most stoic presence in this entire journey.

UniGetUI for the applications. Macrium Reflect for the clone, HDD to SSD, the old drive physically disconnected once more, the correct topology preserved, transferred, made permanent.

And at last: the system on the SSD. The models on I:. ComfyUI. Python. The venvs. All intact. Untouched by everything that had happened around them, like manuscripts preserved in a burning library.

The Stars

I make music. If Ableton ran on Linux, I would have bypassed every circle of this inferno. PipeWire has matured. Yabridge is solid. But "solid" is not "native", and "native" is what a session requires at 2am when the mix is almost done.

So I remain on Windows. A willing exile.

Linux names its hells clearly, with error messages that tell you what burned and why. Windows builds its hells quietly, over years, in partition tables and BCD entries and licence servers, until one day you discover you have been living inside one since 2017.

And so I came back to see the stars.

A partition layout problem from 2017, finally closed in 2025. Everything is where it should be.