So my R6 install was hosed after trying a Pacman upgrade. I downloaded R7 and did an upgrade so it would wipe the system partition. After what appeared to be a flawless install the system rebooted to the splash screen and displays a progress bar with "Preparing to Initialize Kernel" at the bottom of the screen and goes no further. I switched over to the console and all it shows is starting runit stage 1 complete and starting runit stage 2.

Next I brought in another hard drive and did a full install on it but when it reboots all I get is "error loading operating system". I rebooted on the LiveCD and got into console and ran fdisk on both drives. sdb (the new drive, unfortunately not in sda position because it's IDE and all I have handy) shows all 3 partitions as linux and partition 1 bootable just as it should. sda, the original drive, shows the same thing but I toggled partition 1 to non bootable but still no joy. I also removed the original drive to see what it would do, no change. Then reinstalled from scratch on the single drive and still no change.

Any ideas?