kman

Well, I finally realized what was going on here.  I had forgotten that a couple of years ago, I wanted to try and leverage the sdcard reader that was on the back of my motherboard, so I put a copy of unraid 6.9.2 in there.  For whatever reason, I could never get it to boot properly, and because it was a PITA to get to, I just left the sdcard in the slot and changed the boot order in the bios to prioritize my usb drive. Fast forward a couple years (and many beers), and I had completely forgotten the sdcard slot even existed.  <sigh>
 
So apparently when 6.9.2 would boot from my usb drive, it never cared about the sdcard drive - but it apparently caused 6.11.1 issues being there.  All I did was remove the sdcard and reboot with 6.11.1 loaded on my usb drive like I'd been doing.  It came right up no problem.