[TouchPad Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] ChefDan:
FIXED!!

And the verdict is... IT WAS THE USB CABLE. Sstar, I poured over your post and the comment you mentioned. All those lvm.static commands are done by TP Toolbox when you choose Install Android, so I couldn't see where that made a difference. But I tried it anyway. I couldn't figure out how to get a terminal prompt using novacom when it would keep losing connection to the machine, so I had to improvise. I had previously created an Ubuntu 12.04 USB boot stick and downloaded jcsullins' tpdebrick to fix one of the two 16GB touchpads previously, so I edited the tpdebrick script to prematurely exit at line 546, right above where it starts copying the A6 firmware files to the Touchpad. Once there I established a TTY session to the touchpad and manually entered all the commands to configure the Android volumes. However, I never could get WebOSDoctor installed as it recommends in the rest of the post, it kept bombing out at 4%, just like before. I think it must be because some folders and files it's expecting to exist on the Touchpad are missing after you do a Complete Data Reset in TP Toolbox. Finally, out of desperation, I loaded TP Toolbox again and chose Mount Media Volume, in the hopes that maybe I could still get the ROM, recovery and gapps files onto the machine and install. Well, it worked. The mounted Volume was not named HP TOUCHPAD as it was supposed to be, but it was there, and I was indeed able to copy the files to the TP and installed CM11.

Then I thought about it some more. So why would it matter that I manually configured the Android volumes? Turns out it didn't. I did all the above using a brand new 6 ft USB to micro USB cable I bought at Office Depot (Ativa Item #833-445, if anybody's interested). I decided to try the whole process again, using one of the USB cables I had previously, and... the Media Volume would not mount. Tried a 3rd USB cable. No mount again. The new cable was the only one that worked. Why did those cables not work on the 16GB Touchpads, when they worked just fine on 2 previous 32GB Touchpads? I have no idea. I even went back and tested the TP Toolbox Mount Media Volume option on the 32GB Touchpad, and both cables still work, but will NOT work on a 16GB Touchpad. I'll leave that for greater minds than mine to ponder.

Learned a few interesting things along the way:

- If you ever need TP Debrick, you will save yourself a lot of frustration if you use Ubuntu v 12.04 vs the current 14.04. The older version will download the abd and fastboot tools for you; 14.04 requires that you find them and install yourself.

- If your media volume fails to mount in TP Toolbox, like if you had a bad cable, you *MUST* reboot the Touchpad and reload TP Toolbox with a good cable before trying it again. It won't work otherwise.

- Using Ubuntu on a laptop with a mouse touchpad is the most frustrating thing imaginable. Use a standard mouse if you want to keep your blood pressure down.

- If you get the 'There was an error communicating with Google Servers' error when trying to create or sign into your Google account when going through the initial setup, set up, (and you don't have 2 factor authentication on your Google account) check the version of gapps and make sure that is named gapps-kk-20140105.zip with a size of 87,179,530 bytes. There is another, smaller version of the same file out there that apparently does not have Google Play Services in it. If you do have 2 factor authentication, you'll need to create an app password for the Touchpad or turn off 2 factor authentication.

Hope this helps someone!