Exactly! I rant about this a lot, but I know at least couple of people who run with laptops that have broken audio. As it turns out, installing sound card drivers is not really an option as the janky-ass drivers that the manufacturers put out nowadays can irreparably brick your entire system. It is beyond my understanding why recovery, restore, and even safe mode would even try to load them in the first place, but, apparently they do, and then crash before you could even do anything, leaving re-install as the only option.

Meanwhile, I rm -rf-ed my /boot directory the other day, and then df-ed a couple gigs of /dev/zero straight into /dev/sda. Got it back up running in just a few hours... of kicking myself for why would I do such a stupid thing.