I just installed grub manually and... the live image is hardcoded to use the ISO label to mount its partitions
*sob*
It's set up! Finally! And memtest was already on the ISO, I didn't have to jump through hoops to get a writable boot environment, it just... wasn't in the GRUB menu for some reason?
Man idefk anymore. I'm tired. It's installed, I got the badRAM map added to the GRUB defaults and everything, I can worry about finishing everything later.
This would be a lot easier if I didn't have to worry about copying over badmem maps every time, but that's what I get for working off secondhand parts with the current Situation(tm)