A rather venerable desktop died with a seagate hard-drive going ticka ticka ticka (bad sectors hitting a /var partition), so a new drive is acquired and perhaps due to the age of the motherboard (>10 year old intel) no partition pattern this old nerd tried would get a new install to boot. So, what the hell, try the 'new' archinstall script. Not only did it get it booting (still not sure how) but hours of patiently re-following arch install was turned into minutes. Thank you to Anton Hvornum the maintainer of archinstall , i owe you a beer and then-some.