Tried that, but had to separately install grub-common and grub-pc.
That process gave some feedback that some grub-legacy files existed and
asked if I wanted to migrate to grub2, which I did, and then asked which
drive to install grub...I chose /dev/sda, and then it went about its
business.
After going through the umount steps, a reboot gave the right result.

My laptop boots. Great leap forward.

Many thanks for your help, and to Craig, Nic and Colin for continuing to
follow this saga and make helpful contributions.


--
Regards,
Terry Duell