[scalable]

Assuming he did fix it. I remember the time I had some annoyances with my boot loader. After several tries at fixing it, I thought "I should get a clean start, lets dd zeros to mbr!". I did recover from that but it took so much time I didn't want to ever go through anything like it again.

I never recovered from losing a truecrypt password once.

Linux from scratch taught me that Linux is magic, and that if you deviate the slightest amount from the instructions, or try to customize anything, you are in for a world of pain.