For anyone who might know…
I bought a laptop from Amazon last week, which (as all laptops do because monopolies) had Windows 10 installed on it. I did the usual fiddling with the UEFI and BIOS to allow it to install Debian… and then the Debian installer didn’t work. I tried with three or four different installers (stable, testing, oldstable, netinst) and all failed, usually at the “detecting hardware” stages. Some didn’t detect the hard drive, others the CD drive, but none would actually install properly.
I got past my level of knowledge, and passed it on to a friend who has a lot of sysadmin experience. He’s still doing stuff, but his best guess at the moment is that there’s a hardware fault.
For those of you who know, *is it possible for me to return this laptop to Amazon*, or will they refuse it? My guess is that they’ll do a like-for-like replacement (Amazon are pretty good usually) but I don’t know, and I didn’t read the EULAs because I only booted into Windows long enough to change the settings…