Stab in the dark - within the chroot jail maybe it knows about the
mounted *tree* but it doesn't know about the mounts themselves? In
other words, by doing the mounts outside of the chroot, you are
updating /etc/mnttab in the "Live USB" environment, but /etc/mnttab in
the chroot environment is not updated.
I'm sorry but I really dont understand the terminology/jargon here.
Are you saying I did the commands in the wrong order? I'm just following the
instructions in the link I included.
Alternative - maybe do a fresh install using the wiped partitions to
get a complete and reasonably valid /boot, and leverage that to find
and boot the LUKS partition?
I did try this, thats how I noticed the vmlinuz , iniramfs files were missing...but
apparenly that doesnt matter?
I'm not sure. I dont really understand.