Part 2 of: networking disabled on laptop running ubuntu 16.04 LTS

[M. Fioretti]

Greetings, again.

as you know, I have this HP Pavilion G6 laptop running Ubuntu
16.04 LTS x86_64 and Windows 8 in which, all of a sudden,
both wired and wireless connectivity stopped working, but only
in Ubuntu, not in Windows. Details in my original thread:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2016-November/288238.html

this afternoon I finally managed to re-download the same Ubuntu
version that is installed there, load it on an USB drive, and booth
from it.

When the initial screen appeared (the one with the two buttons,
"try Ubuntu" and "Install ubuntu"), it DID also show in the upper
right corner a message saying "you are now connected via eth0"
or something similar.

So I clicked on "try ubuntu", to verify that I could actually
use ethernet from the live image... and it's now about 30
minutes that the laptop is frozen. Just the background image,
nothing else.

I am now going to power it down and retry, maybe in rescue mode,
and will report here later. In the meantime, and taking the above
as confirmation that it still is possible to use at least ethernet
from Ubuntu on that hardware, I'm thinking to try one of those
ways:

1) manually download packages to the drive, then boot normally and
    install them? But which packages?

2) copying some networking configuration files from the live
    image to the hard drive, in the corresponding folders, then
    reboot normally and see what happens. But even here, which files?

your suggestions remain very welcome, of course.

TIA,
Marco