Damn, that's really annoying. It doesn't seem a fun weekend plan :(
Have your mathematically excluded the software culprit?
Discussion
The new hardware isn't working. The BIOS is not coming up. Not quite dead as the fans spin and RGB lights up. I haven't installed anything on it yet.
:(
While I wait for the new hardware BIOS upgrade, I took the NVMe out of my gaming rig and installed a new blank one. Today I setup debian on it. Then I installed my workstation NVMe alongside it and also my 2 SATA 6TB HDs with btrfs so right now I have access to all my data again. But on a shit monitor (yes my gaming rig has a small monitor) and at a shit desk.
I decided to make this harder than it needs to be by building new instead of just booting my old workstation NVMe ... every 5-10 years I find it necessary to start over else you get buried in broken cruft and inexplicable behavior.
Every 5-10 years I also prefer to start from scratch, without any written guidance, and I do not use my old dotfiles, but copy and paste the specific parts I need when the need arises.
This helps me to have a fresh system and not to stick to old habits, but to improve them creatively.
Sometimes it's good to start over.
Yep. I've brought over dotfiles as I need them: .ssh, .gnupg, .git, .mozilla (but cleaned it up), .emacs, some .bashrc, and of course .local/share/gossip
Others are easily regenerated by their software: .cargo, .rustup, .cache, .config/* (rarely does any of that config matter), etc.