His sister finished her project with hours to spare. She never knew about the bootloader, the missing MBR, or the panic. She just knew her brother was a wizard.

Windows logo. Spinning dots. Login screen.

Three hours later, after frantically Googling on his phone while staring at a blinking cursor, he found a forum post from 2012. The user had the exact same problem. The solution? “Install EasyBCD. It rewrites the Windows bootloader without a recovery disk.” EasyBCD. A small, free tool that ran inside Windows. But he couldn’t boot into Windows. Classic chicken-and-egg.

He removed the USB drive, rebooted, and held his breath.