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.