When I bought this very cheap laptop I disabled the UEFI booting system and deleted MSWindows from the machine, then booted it from CD, intending to do a full install at some time in the future. I had come to feel there must be a way to do a frugal install that boots entirely from the hard drive. Last night I decided to bite the bullet and work out a way to do it.
After a lot of reading on the topic I gave it a shot... and lost my system. I could still boot from the CD, and I could see all my files were there, I just couldn't persuade my computer to boot up with all my settings and software. [sigh]
As I say, it took me many hours, but I finally have my system back, however I'm still booting from CD. I'll do more reading soon, probably tonight, and try again. I'll likely keep trying until I succeed. It is a bit scary though. :) (Crossposted from https://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/335762.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: