Early yesterday am I was still half asleep and needed to format a flash drive to put some music on, could not format in Windows 10 as it errored out so I rebooted into Ubuntu 20.04 and fired up Gparted and .....

You guested it.......

I formatted the 1 tb NVMe Windows 10 drive.

So what to do.....

Looking at the files on motherboard driver disk, MSI X570 Gaming Plus, I see some Windows 7 drivers and install files.

I know what to do.

I will need to create a image with some drivers injected so it will see the USB ports and the NVMe drive..

Creating now.

Yes I know Windows 7 is "no longer supported" but I don't care.

It's either going to be MS spying on me guarantied or some hacker IF i'm not careful.

Well the boot flash is done so I need to shut down and unplug the Ubuntu SSD and then reboot to give it a go.

That blows. There should be a failsafe against that.

That's the reason I keep a somewhat up to date Macrium drive image of my computers on my network server (which is just a old HP corporate computer). One screw up and I can be back up in 15 minutes with a Macrium boot USB.

Well the good thing is I back up pretty regularly so I did not lose anything important.

But unfortunately there is no fix for doing something stupid because I was in a rush and not paying attention.

Seems the Windows 7 flash drive with the slip-streamed drivers did not work and did not see the NVMe drive i'll go ahead and try it on a SSD next.

I did try the generic Windows 7 NVMe driver from MS but but it seems not to work on a new pci-e 4.0 drive.

Was able to install windows 7 on a spare SSD in an older pc and when it rebooted before it finalized I swapped it into my Ryzen pc.

Booted up and as expected no usb mouse or usb keyboard but I had already plugged a ps2 mouse in the single ps2 plug on the motherboard and was able to use the mouse and onscreen keyboard to boot it to the desktop and install drivers.

I was able to install everything except one "unknown pci device" and clicked update driver and pointed it to the msi driver dvd and it found a driver but complained that it was not signed.

So I installed it anyway and when I went to reboot it got stuck at a "attempting to repair the install" screen.

Never booted after that.

Man it was running sweet!!

I guess the last unknown pci device was the NVMe drive and that was a big mistake trying to force a driver for that.

So now i'm creating a Windows 10 install flash drive and will reinstall that.