Yes, that's it. waitusb. Everything is cooking now.
Set it up at 20 and then walked it back to 4 ... at which point TC boot no longer captured pendrive. Set a permanent value of 10 in grub boot entry
Magnificent. Now I'll make an effort to summon the courage to add a note to the wiki.
Thanks very much for the help. I regularly tear down and rebuild my os. For that reason, I need a quick drop back to another os with partimage, so I can do a reinstall. Have been using Sysrescue ... but that boot time is an eternity compared to TinyCore.
Again, muchisimas gracias.