Booting from a usb, the LXDX spin demo runs ok, but when I try to install, Anaconda refuses to recognize any hard drive

Not much more to add. There is apparently some alternative way to specify target devices, but it’s not clear to me if any of them apply. Never had this problem before.

That’s LXDE, of course.

OK, scratch this. I tried again this morning and everything worked. No problem recognizing the Acer disk and new installation is proceding normally. Puzzled, why it wouldn’t do that last night, though.