That’s definitely a frustrating situation you have, and I very much encourage you to take the path that feels most possible to you!

Before moving on, I would like to point to trying what u/mvirts suggested, disabling ACPI from the grub bootloader. It’s easy and great for getting an installer running and working, and sometimes the freshly installed and updated OS whisks the problem away.

But regardless of what you choose, I wish you much luck in your endeavours!

Agreed with others that this is likely a BIOS issue, and it would be good to check for a firmware update first.

In particular, this looks like it might be an issue with the USB port locations described by your BIOS ACPI. Maybe one of the embedded root hubs? You might be able to play with USB settings in the BIOS Config to see if that helps, especially loading default values. I also think it might be possible to blacklist ports from kernel parameters and that could be a good check… but I’m not very familiar with the parameters in recent years and didn’t find anything in a quick search.

As a last ditch, you can disable ACPI entirely, but it can/will cause very odd performance and configuration issues along with no power management. (This goes double for portable systems.)

This makes me feel so much better after spending a morning banging my head against some wild pointer arithmetic, thank you much much! (Ultimately the pointer incantations were successful, praise be!)

You are reminding me that I used to keep a copy of Nesticle (for DOS!) on an AOL floppy, along with a couple of ROMs. I saved the fancy Imation Disney disks for my data 😅

Thank you for the flashback!