@rabbitholecomputing Sorry for the delay on this, I just got back from a long business trip and things have been quite busy since I returned. I just wanted to say thank you publicly for taking the time to dig into this issue I really was starting to become very frustrated.
I was able to load the 1.06FW just this morning and it immediately booted fully from a random 7.1 image that I had on there from my numerous previous attempts. I then swapped to some images I received from
@jasa1063 in a previous attempt to get things working. He had provided me with two images one 7.1 and one 8.1 both 2GB files with full system installs on them. Both files loaded right up and fully booted using this new FW. I didn't have time to play around with it much beyond that as far as system stability goes, but I will say this is incredibly promising, previously this did not work at all. I still am not using an .ini file the result I'm seeing here is simply with the FW upgrade.