Ya know, sometimes MS manages to tick me off. That's hard to do as I have a very calm demeanor.

Part 1: My CPU fan died. P3D was crashing, my bluetooth driver started crashing, then outlook started crashing, etc.. The fan alarm function of my (former - wait for it...) Gigabyte Gaming 7 Z390 motherboard was set, but did not work. I had to put the computer up onto the desk and pull the cover to see that the fan wasn't spinning. No problem. There's a micro center near me, so I reserved another EVO 212 cooler and picked it up that evening (last Friday). On my home from the micro center, I stopped at the pub. First mistake. The pub closed at 10pm due to covid, so I got home early toting a brand new CPU cooler and a buzz. Second mistake. I decided to install it so that it would be ready to go on Saturday morning. You see where this is going, right? I put the computer back on my desk and pulled the cover off. One of my cats jumps up on the desk and starts begging. Crud, I forgot to get them their fish. I went into the kitchen and put the food out for them and came back and started to replace the CPU cooler. Third mistake. I got distracted and forgot to turn off the power switch on the power supply, or pull the AC cord. The old cooler came right out. The new (metal) cooler bracket took a little playing around with to get it properly into place. Fourth mistake - letting the metal bracket hit something hot. Needless to say, she no worky after that. Nothing but a cycle of power up, power down, repeat... I had a old MB  sitting nearby, so I plugged it into my PS. It powered up, and stayed up. I blew up my MB. 

Part 2: I use my computer for work, so it has to be up and running by Monday morning. Since there is a major supply problem with parts these days, my choices were limited to what micro center had in stock. $850 later, I leave with an Asus TUF Gaming Z490 plus WiFi, a 500GB M2 drive, a copy of Windows 10 Pro (more on that shortly), and an i9-10850K.

Part 3: My plan was to boot up off the old hard drive long enough to get logged in and copy my AppData and ProgramData folders, and hopefully plug in my new Win 10 Pro key and do an in place upgrade when it complained about the hardware changes I had made. But nooooooooooooooo... MS appears to have decided that it just will not let a drive (Win 10 Home) be moved to another machine and booted from. No matter what I did, it would not recognize the original C drive as a boot drive. I ended up pulling that drive out of the system to keep it safe, installing the M2 drive, and doing a fresh install of Win 10 Pro. Once that was done, I reinstalled the old drive. Everything on it was intact. I took ownership of the file system and have access to everything I need. The problem is that now that I've done a fresh install, everything has to be re-installed to get the registry populated. I can restore everything back to it's previous state later, but what a hassle.

So thank you for nothing, Microsoft. You stink. Yes, I am also flipping you the bird as I type this. Just let the bloody thing boot from my old installation just once so that I can give you my money the easy way. I want my afternoon back. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your crotch. Phooey on you.

Rant mode off. Thanks for listening.      

Bummer

I thought sure you were going to say that when you came back, the cat was curled up inside the computer. That's what my cat would have done.

Yup. As soon as the MB fried, you were in for a long day. Not much way around it.

No, but the smaller one has an affinity for jumping on top of it when I set it up on the desk with the side cover off. I'm just waiting for the tail to hit one of the fans. She's gonna jump 12 feet lol. 

You got that right. It has been a long 2 days. In the end it all worked out. This system runs P3D like a scalded cat, but I've basically had to reinstall P3D and all of the add ons even though I had everything on a separate drive. Every add on had some sort of issue until I reinstalled it. AIG took the longest by far.