Thanks.
"LOADING ENVIRONMENT FROM EXT4: FILE NOT FOUND --- "/BOOT/BOOT.env"
I installed Focal OS's and it went into english, but upon restarting the desktop, it wouldn't restart; I tried with and without internet connection. For Buster, i have not had success; don't even recall at this point what happened after so many tries in different ways...
But the one thing that IS consistent with all of the downloaded OS's, is the error message above. I see this at the beginning of each boot-up. As far as the downloaded desktop from a few years ago, i don't recall if this 'file not found' error message applies to that; i will have to follow-up with that info.
As a side note, for the downloaded desktop OS's, i did 'not' try updating / upgrading and then run into the problems. The problems stemmed from the direct, unmodified download/desktop.
Here is the log site for the OS i am using now to connect to the internet. It is the old OS, like 10.0, i think, from a few years ago. It works fine except that if i update/upgrade, it will no longer connect to the internet, though it does fully boot-up, unlike Focal, which would try to boot up, and then i would just get a blank screen. http://ix.io/2MBq.
Since Focal will not boot up, i will have to redo Focal and get the log printout before restarting the desktop for Focal. However, i can only post here 1x per day which means i will have to wait 24 hours to post the results, unless Igor will remove that restriction for a day.
HOWEVER........ the output log at this site does 'not' make any sense. At the top it states "raspberry pi". I have 2 Orangepi boards, plus2e, and 'zero' raspberry pi boards, so i don't know why it is showing rasp-pi in the output.
So i ran it again in a new terminal and got what seems like a very different output: http://ix.io/2MBv
Would really like to fix this sooner rather than later.
Thanks for everyone's help!