So, thanks to the help from this forum I was able to get my GFH setup with the rescue system, and a uboot that functions flawlessly with nc. So I am able to fully control/monitor the boot process and boot the rescue system from NAND, usb devices that have appropriately labeled partitions, as well as boot from the SATA 3tb drive. I have the 3tb drive setup with the first partition at like 20gb ext3, second partition is small swap partition, third partition is massive ext4 partition for storage.
At some point a few months back my SATA booting filesystem got corrupted, so now the boot loader starts the kernel but then nothing happens that I can tell. Unfortunately I never got to configure the SATA kernel to use netconsole for dmesg output, so I have no idea what is happening once uBoot hands things off to the kernel. The short version is that my SATA partition filesystem is borked.
Which is fine for now. I'm fine with booting off USB for awhile. The thing of it is that I moved recently and I lost my old booting usb stick (the one that I based my SATA install off of originally).
Can someone point me in the direction of an image for a usb stick that has a nice kernel and will boot on a goflex home??? I can take it from there with adding packages and customizing it the way I need it (first up, make it use the SATA swap), I just need a base install on a usb drive to work from.
I'd also like to say thanks to the community for soldiering on and making some awesome improvements over the last few months while I've been moving and doing other things!