RE: https://oldbytes.space/@kianryan/115828017560130597
@feff will know more, but if I understood it all at the time, the TLDR was:
My gaming laptop was not a standard setup - it had "Raid" running whateverthatis, and like two different disks or something? My laptop is 10 years old and especially specced for Gamers(tm).
It was a bit of a double whammy - the set up had a tiny SSD and a massive HDD. The laptop had been set to RAID too.
But the big thing was that the Mint Live image we used initially had corrupted in a very subtle way, where it was perfectly fine as a Live Image, but as soon as you wanted to install grub (the very last step of installing) it would crash the Installer because it couldn't find the EFI partition it had just made.
The error message made no suggestion of a corrupted image, which is why we spent so much time in the BIOS trying to see what hardware option we hadn't seen in years might be causing the issue.
It was only because I gave up and tried installing UwUntu on the SSD alone that it became obvious that something was up on the Mint image (which I swiftly replaced)
So I guess it's props to the Live Image for being almost fully functional even when corrupted, but slightly frustrating as I'd rather have the Live Image fail to boot entirely if the ISO was corrupted. We might have jumped to 'I need to replace the ISO' sooner...
