Morning,
I got the laptop with 4GB RAM for one evening. It wouldn't boot the USB stick
So I installed VirtualBox on Windows (hey, 3GB RAM+10GB swap is still better than 2GB RAM+2GB swap…) and installed TC on a new virtual machine, using CorePlus iso.
The USB stick was inserted, so that I could later copy my files over to the fake hard disk. TC_install correctly listed sda1 (swap), sda2 (previously formatted as ext3) and sdb1 (usb), and I selected sda2 for installation. TC_install even displayed that it was setting the boot flag on sda2, but it failed to install nonetheless. Never did I select sdb1, nor did I mount it.
Long story short: TC_install made something to my USB stick in the process for no reason, rendering it unreadable, and I'm worse than back to square one, rather back to square zero
Time was running short (I had to give back the laptop in the morning, with all traces of my activity removed), so this marks the end of my efforts; I'm out of options. I'm going back to TC 4.7.7.
Good luck to the next one