Frustrating day today. No progress on getting the new laptops installed or backed up. Some things point at a grub bug that's been around for >1 year so every distro's live iso is broken and it complains. The Lenovo BIOS has a frustrating lack of options to twiddle.

Next things to try are disabling the TPM, and after that, probably starting to spleunk for older images to find one that works. If all else fails I can probably build my own installer with a correct version.