F18: rescue EFI boot from rescue disk: cannot "modprobe efivars"

[Nick Urbanik]

Dear Folks,

I tried to upgrade my Fedora 18 x86_64 on my Lenovo X121e laptop from
grub-efi to grub2-efi with a failure to boot.  I followed the wiki
entry for Fedup, under "Updating GRUB".

From a rescue disk, I cannot run efibootmgr.  The response is always,
"Fatal: Couldn't open either sysfs or procfs directories for accessing
EFI variables.
Try "modprobe efivars" as root"

Now this has no visible effect.  I have been unable to run
efibootmgr.  I would really appreciate some ideas on what I can do now
to boot this machine.