I think it's time to throw in the towel. The only reason I'm spending
so much time on this is that I had knee surgery a few days ago and I'm
sitting here at home, not mobile enough to do much else but putter with
my machines. But I think I'll just forget about that shiny new NVMe
SSD - it was an extra toy I got talked into as part of a motherboard
upgrade but it isn't really necessary. My original hard drive is still
intact and works perfectly well (albeit a bit slower than the SSD),
so I'll just go back to booting from it. If someday my machine has
a meltdown and really does need to be rebuilt from scratch, then I'll
re-visit the matter. It's sort of like normal system updates/upgrades -
usually they work smoothly and I can upgrade from one release to another
without touching anything else. But if things really go south (which
they have done once or twice in the past, but not often), I have enough
backups to put Humpty Dumpty together again - and I'll work the SSD
into the re-build.