For some reason, doing a hot restart when your computer is trying to figure out the proper way to render blobmesh particles for over 20 minutes causes it to enter a startup recovery loop that cannot be fixed.

Long story short, I'm typing this on a fresh install after trying everything I can to fix it.

The good news is I did not lose any data.

Which is good because I HATE losing stuff I've worked years to get.

I should mention that the new install is on a different drive and I will try one more thing to set things right which involves doing an upgrade install with the old drive, but there's a chance I'd lose data. CAN'T HAVE THAT

So I'm going to do a partition copy to get a 1:1 copy of everything onto this new drive so that in case the fix doesn't work, I can still grab everything and work from there.

Wish me luck! I have some images I've been wanting to finish and it's driving me nuts!