Success!!!!!
I needed the bootcodes "waitusb=5 tce=sda1" for the USB drive to be ready to save/load things, i think - at any rate, I think i understand how everything is working together
Now, I was wondering if lines can be added to bootlocal.sh like:-
cd /
cd bin
vi
in order to start vi at bootup, kind of like an MS DOS autoexec.bat file?