Not quite relevant, but might share anyhow
Last Thursday, I was doing a Dell laptop from 2014, complete with a Broadwell Core i3 and, lo and behold, a hard disk.
It was unable to find /Boot/BCD (either on the "legacy" System Reserved partition*, or on the C: drive). So I whipped out my phone and booted the Windows 10 installation ISO. After switching the system's BIOS (firmware, for pedants) to UEFI mode and enabling Secure Boot, I ran MBR2GPT, had to delete a couple of empty partitions, then rebooted. Windows 10 booted successfully, albeit after a heeeuuuge wait.
Did I do the sensible thing and return the machine to its owner? Hell no. Pedant Me thought that Windows 8.1 would be a lighter load on the hard-disk-laden machine (which it actually is) ... inserted my Windows 8.1 DVD (because it's genuine media, or otherwise I'd be dealing in ISOs all the way), then formatted.
Surprise surprise, the machine's HDD was too crap to boot 8.1. I was left with a machine stuck in limbo, with neither Windows 10 nor 8.1. Had to waste hours that day coaxing anything at all to boot.
TL;DR: When you are on a tight budget with available time (deadlines in hours), trashing a machine (well, an OS) is really equivalent to trashing important stuff on the machine, in terms of time wasted.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
