wow, the pmos community has changed, and for the better too
huge thanks to sam:samcday.com on matrix. he basically sat and helped me work thru lk2nd (bootloader) bugs, until i actually got it working! prob spent 8 hours at least just helping me
unfortunately i havent solved the above issue yet, but people in the chat seem to think its not a memory problem but maybe a config one. i need to play around with some of the suggestions and see if any work for me