Success!:
can you run (when you are stuck in initrd/initramfs):
# cat /proc/cmdline
This is just to check your parmeters.
Also can you mount sda3 "by hand" then?
# cat /proc/cmdline
root=UUID=78785b3c-875f-4e35-8529-09f0e63d96ccro quiet splash
That's the old, buggy commandline from the
sda1 menu.lst .
The existing MBR I installed with my previous (FAT32 sda3, a la USB Flash) process to point at that old 0704 menu.lst with 0710 added as an option, and I hadn't edited that menu.lst to fix the bug (thinking, like you, that it wasn't in the critical path). I fixed the sda1 menu.lst, booted into it, and now it works! 0710 loaded, and is now sitting at the AV Wizard Step 0. Thanks for all the help, mostly just correcting my boneheaded mistakes.
The net instructions I'm following now don't specify how to make the MBR point at the 0710 installer partition's menu.lst , even though that's the clean way to do this. If I have that MBR instruction, I'll revise and post this complete, tested process in the wiki.
Thanks for holding my hand through this
.