You booted the laptop and did choose start linux lite. Then removed all the partitions on the drive, formatted it to ext4 and then installed LL while you were in the live session and used the default settings during the setup. If you boot the laptop and press f12 and select the harddrive to boot from what happens then? What looks the screen like when you press f12
Life on earth is expensive but it does include a free trip around the sun.