[djf]

Ok.
I got my password problems figured out.
Now I have what appears to be a bare bones system disk without grub - if I point the bios to it to boot, it issues a couple messages about rescue disk and is stuck - the only way I can boot it is to boot a CD I have with a grub loader, he detects and lists all the images I have in disk and I pick “Linux Cinnamon”
So how do I get grub loaded to disk?

[Pollard]

I installed Linux recently on an Acer and was left with no grub menu and the below app fixed it.

https://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair/home/Home/

This article describes using the above app or using the command line to repair grub; https://www.howtogeek.com/114884/how-to-repair-grub2-when-ubuntu-wont-boot/

Did you do manual partitioning as above? Maybe the drive/device for the boot loader isn't what it should have been. Don't know if you mentioned what you have for drives. The above has just one it looks like, sda. My laptop has two HDDs so it has an sda and sdb. I'm using sda for /, /boot and swap and using sdb for /home and the boot loader is the drive that is sda.

If I ever reinstall, the screen above will NOT have /home checked off for formatting. I'll reuse /home as /home but not format it since it has my data aka settings, config and 100+ gb of files.

You can boot off the Live USB and start to install until you get to the above screen to check what drive the boot loader is one and then cancel the installation without formatting anything and then try that boot-repair.

Here's the boot-repair dev's Ubuntu page, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Yannubuntu & boot-repair on launchpad, https://launchpad.net/boot-repair