M00nM00n

ohhh for those who read this and have/had the same problem. I needed to do sudo armbian-upgrade (that updated the sd cards os to have the new patch) then I could do armbian-install. Also I got to choose between boot native on the new drive or with the sd card. My case I NEED to boot through the sd card to have the hand off with cmdline.txt

Look at this! the new install on the sda does not have a boot vfat RPICFG not duplicate labels or uuids the sd card has the /boot/firmware is still on the sd card. Going to see that after the reboot if that changes.. it did! look and it switched it to /boot/media/boot-media
this is interesting though, it changed the cmdline.txt to something i have no clue what. going to reboot and see what that is, not messing with that yet.
sudo nano /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt   root=UUID=643c87dd-4d14-42bf-a892-0a6e3ee044ea
 
ahh added uuid to the lsblk and there it is! its the uuid of sda1! Read somewhere that for this to work you don't want any code that says partuuid but uuid (resync command or something like that). So that covers that as well amazing! 

Round of applause to you Igor! thank you so much for the help! I would not have been able to make this setup work with out you!
 
zack@rpi5b:~$ lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,PARTUUID,SIZE,MOUNTPOINTS
NAME        FSTYPE LABEL      PARTUUID                               SIZE MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                111.8G
└─sda1      ext4              d9372f5f-01                          111.8G
mmcblk0                                                              7.3G
├─mmcblk0p1 vfat   RPICFG     3f631019-01                            512M /boot/firmware
└─mmcblk0p2 ext4   armbi_root 3f631019-02                            6.6G /var/log.hdd
                                                                          /
zram0       swap                                                     3.9G [SWAP]
zram1       ext4   log2ram                                            50M /var/log
zram2                                                                  0B
zack@rpi5b:~$
 
zack@rpi5b:~$ lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,UUID,PARTUUID,SIZE,MOUNTPOINTS
NAME FSTYPE LABEL      UUID                                 PARTUUID                               SIZE MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                                              111.8G
└─sda1
     ext4              643c87dd-4d14-42bf-a892-0a6e3ee044ea d9372f5f-01                          111.8G /var/log.hdd
                                                                                                        /
mmcblk0
│                                                                                                  7.3G
├─mmcblk0p1
│    vfat   RPICFG     2BC3-00C2                            3f631019-01                            512M
└─mmcblk0p2
     ext4   armbi_root dac1d070-1336-47c9-9afe-9b073133f6b0 3f631019-02                            6.6G /boot
                                                                                                        /media/boot-media
zram0
     swap              ce5ea331-4cc3-43cb-9a5d-2abcccbf35e8                                        3.9G [SWAP]
zram1
     ext4   log2ram    b6aac3b0-85de-4f55-be3b-fb4e3b025461                                         50M /var/log
zram2