This all makes sense, unfortunately I have already started rebuilding this system. This just gave me a good excuse to do it, but I was already unhappy with the partitioning. Before FOG I was trying MDT and installing onto the third partition of the Dell factory setup, thus the deleting the recovery partition in the middle and the wasted space. I have actually, since the mishap, switched to the latest KitchenSink kernel. So in the end, even if it all works well, there will have been too many variables to say what actually broke last time. Thanks to all for the help.