Getting rid of 2.8

[bonnevie]

Yes, that did it, writing this from the "bricked" machine.  I followed your steps but before doing anything, I decided to first check my partition with GParted in LL3.0 LiveCD. Surprise, it was sdb6! If you go up into my first post, you'll see that I was dealing with sda6. Anyway, with sdb6, your instructions worked perfectly.
Thanks Goldfinger (and also Jerry for that cool Youtube vid!).  This was not a Linux Lite trouble per se, but this community is so helpful, it's natural to check here first.