OK, I’m an idiot, I’d somehow overwritten the ramdisk image with the kernel, turning off quiet produced an error that made that clear (unreadable ramdisk image, essentially).
Now I can load the kernel, but I eventually just end up at a command prompt. If I type “acronis” there, it does some stuff (something with network interfaces then enumerating my drives) but then just dumps me back to the prompt. Do I need to run it from a graphical environment? Is there any way to automate whatever the solution to getting it to run is?