[Skybird]

Thats the thing. I just do not believe the hardware. UEFI or Linux installation settings may have misconfigured data about the hardware configuration, but I still think the hardware has no hardware damage.

Whenever I asked the people in the forum in the past two years about problems I had, one of the first replieswhen they had no answer was "Its your hardware broken", and later on I managed to pull myself out of the swamp or had others pulling me out of the swamp, I got along again - obviously the hardware worked very well, but what those guys could not stand was that something was not easy, breezy, self-explanatory, perfect in Linux land - the mistake could not be with Linux, so it must be the hardware. I have become very sceptical about that claim. The hardware looks like being good one to me. The UEFI, maybe, first time I dealt with it today, and BOOOM. Something underlying with Linux on root level. Or part of the booting stuff got moved around or went amiss during that broken stick operaiton whcih seems to have started this nightmare.

I had the machine off for half an hour, and then desperately tried again. The UEFI still lists no drive options, but I tried again the 17.2 nevertheless. And it started. I did a base installation to SSD, automatically, no manual partitioning, and just have booted the thing first time since this mess began without a boot medium. The old installation is gone, I hope, it should be.

Now I test the retuning of options (forgot it all in the past 1.5 years since I last did it), and see how to mount drives again (forgot that as well), and see whether I can partition things like I want (home on HD, the rest on SSD).

Finally things saw some improvement. Whether I could install 18 now, remains to be seen.

Don'T ask me what happens here and why. I have no clue, I just hope the trend of the last hour continues.