@brad@1040ste.net
@jessamyn@glammr.us It's a joy to read about you helping people like this. I'd like to recommend the SystemRescueCD for any thumb drive or other disc-related work; you can burn it to a CD/DVD, or write it to a USB drive, and then reboot your system to run temporarily from the CD/thumb drive.
Caveat, it is a Linux system, with a welter of tools for fixing your system and investigating filesystem issues. If you are already a Linux user or have time to read up on it, it is perfect.
https://www.system-rescue.org/
@jessamyn@glammr.us
@brad@1040ste.net It looks useful but maybe over my head. I went to the Quick Start guide but already it's asking me to do things that I do not know how to do. I appreciate that this is probably a useful tool but not for someone with my skillset (and amount of free time)