Turns out when I imaged the NOOBS sdcard and put it on a larger card, then tried to move the crowded VAR folder to the new partition, but it fubarred the OS…well I just for got to make an empty folder entry on the root to allow fstab to work.
Whoops. I had two 32GB sd cards so I still had the orginal one that failed. Did what I shoulda and bingo it worked.
Still, I went back to the non NOOBS install,