@karog
I'm not sure what happened. I had the boot partition mounted to /boot in fstab, so it should have installed to the correct place. and it looks like the boot partition somehow got updated to the new u-boot, because the u-boot.bin file has a 9/14 date and so did the boot.ini.pacnew file. I'm not sure why it failed. It seems that it failed right after a dd copy of the u-boot.bin file.