As per subject, I'm looking for hint on which beowulf iso to boot off
to e able to manually fix a paritin take an install grub.

I have recently
run both the beowulf 3.0 and 3.1 desktop iso to carry out installations
of a new system.

Both of these isos do not provide a manual partitioner and the 'auto
partitioner' randomly fails to mark any disk as a boot disk. You end up
with a dummy grub install, which is an error and there no way, that I
can find to break out and do this manually.

Nor could I do it under the expert(?) installation after rebooting to
the install.

The partitioner just wants to partition it all, when all I want to do
is mark one disk as the master boot record and no be forced to do a
complete re-install.

My 2c is this auto-partition creates a real dogs breakfast of
partitions. The auto-created partition table that was created
prior(ascii) had
free space
ESP
ext4
swap
free space.

This time it was just
free space
ext4
swap (1gb*)
freespace

I do not know if this weird partitioning scheme was part of the reason
for the update grub screwing up.