Well, Odysseus is back home after the shortest venture into uncharted territory of all time. The machine is fully operable, but I apparently neglected some homework.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a duplicate of the drive before taking it in, and afterward duplicated the Users folder daily until I took it in.
What I didn’t realize was that Disk Utility has a less cumbersome disk imaging feature intended for use as a backup and restore tool. The upshot is that somehow I scrambled the write permissions on the volume, and while it boots properly, prefs and stuff like install records, licensing keys, and the like are not being read or recognized.
So I have a longish round of repeated restores ahead of me to find the correct materials. Hopefully someone’s solved this problem previously, and I’ll beable to find out more from them.
Is it write perms, or uids? When I got molly back from the Apple Store, user 1 was no longer me, but Apple. So I had to do a buncha chown/chgrping to make things work. I’m still not 100% it all got sorted…. But it works.
well, the tone of the final linked thread in the CCC fora post would seem to indicate UIDs as you suggest.