Tiny Core boots from the hard drive fine now after the utility install. I have a hard time specifying exactly what the situation is, let my try and clear things up for the record.
I was using a usb thumb/flash drive instead of a cd, I used Unetbootin to put the iso file on the flash drive. My goal was to do a frugal install on the hard drive.
Thank you for working with my muddy descriptions. I'm extremely happy to have Tiny Core up and running.