The night before a Windows feature update
C: had 6 GB free; the user kept clearing caches. A calm shrink-and-extend plan plus an image backup avoided a bricked update and saved a weekend.
CASEBOOK
Stories we see again and again
Details are fictionalized; the failure modes are not. Use them as mental simulations before touching production disks.
The clone that almost shipped
A loose USB dock caused retries mid-clone. Switching to a direct motherboard port and disabling sleep finished the job without corrupting the source.
Boot loop after 'quick' cleanup
Deleting an unfamiliar 500 MB partition removed EFI files. Recovery required WinPE, bcdboot, and a lesson about labels versus contents.
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