Problems installing grub

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I'm having problems...  and because I'm doing something a bit tricky, I'm
probably confused.

I have to send my motherboard in for a warranty repair, and don't want my
system out of service longer than an hour or so.  I have to send the HDD in
with it because of the kind of problem I'm having ("stability").  So I've
made a clone of all of the partitions on another drive and I'm trying to
make it work.  It's not going well.

Several things are bothering me, but I'll just describe the first one.  It
won't boot from the hard drive.

Now I'm guessing it's because the two drives are different sizes, so I used
gdisk to put a GPT partition table on the new drive and set up partitions
to match the old one, then used gparted to copy the ext4 partition contents
over.  I used dd to copy the boot partition.

I figured I use grub itself to do this.  I have a Mushkin USB stick with
Xubuntu 16.04.1 on it, both 32 and 64 bit.  So I boot from the Mushkin, run
update-grub, and then grub-install to the HDD.

Problem 1A: this works from the 32-bit version.  Fails from the 64-bit
version with the message

grub-install: error: /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please
specify --target or --directory.

Problem 1B: even after installing from 32-bit version, booting from HDD
takes me to an emergency mode where I can look at a log.  There are
messages in red, but they run off the right edge of my screen, and I don't
fully understand them -- but they seem to be about mounting some of my
partitions.  I'm not clear on how to copy that log so I can show it to
you.  I can escape out of the rescue mode, and there's a twirling thing
that usually means it's about to ask me to log in, but it never gets
there.  If I boot into rescue mode, I can get to a command prompt, and it
looks like my partitons are mounted, so I don't know what the problem
really is.

Can anybody help me with this?

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman
#define QUESTION ((bb) || (!bb))   /* Shakespeare */

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