OK, I think it worked but won't be able to try and boot till tonight. It did make teh CF and is a bit over 121MB total. To make it work, I nuked the sudo -E parts and had to make a link from mkdosfs to be mkfs.msdos. This one also choked on grep, and my way was to download the file to my web server and get it from there. Had to do same for lm-sensors.