The good news is, my ThinkPad A31p didn’t burst into flames and destroy every copy of my data when we tried to migrate back over to it.
The bad news is, that’s about the extent of the good news.
Ghosted everything up, Ghosted everything down (to the older, larger HD), all went well — but the HD controller is different enough between the two ThinkPads that the image won’t complete a boot.
Rats.
So I have the tech looking at the whether he can get the correct driver file(s) onto the system (pulling the HD and putting it into another box), and, in the meantime, I have my temp computer still (needing some restores on it after stripping off the backed-up data files this morning).
Again, rats.
If this doesn’t work, then I’ll get instead a fresh baseline image, and I get to reinstall all my software and reconfigure (most of) it. Again. Not high on my list of things to do, though one of the dangers, of course, of heavily configuring your machine away from the baseline. Dagnabbit.