My beloved had crashed. The tech said he had never seen anything quite like it as he worked to save my thousands of pages of documents, but his final recourse was to build buffer that would block and erase my documents so that a new operating system could be installed.
Of course, his words at this point included, “You do have everything backed up, right?” Hmmmm, “No.” Unfortunately I had trusted my laptop and now payback for this folly headed my way. With a tip and a tap, my old-new machine was ready without all of my years of work cluttering its internal drive.