I was installing Arch several years ago now and somehow deleted all of the partitions and then all of a sudden I didn't see any drives or anything on it so I closed it and powered down and assumed it was a paperweight. Years later i decided to see if I could get it running again and I was able to get it running again. I found out that hard shutdowns would have got everything up and going again to them point I could put an OS back on it. So I don't know which one was dumber, the installation mistake or me thinking the laptop became a paperweight. I lean towards the latter because I've had no problems with Arch since.
Impressive that Gentoo was your first distro.