yeah, i think that was much faster than i imagined it would be. everything just copied over neatly.

i'm going to leave the catroot files in place. i think they ought to be unnecessary, but i can't stop random processes like windows activation from happening. that's what i'm going with right now - the activation runs as an update locally, and causes internal havoc by running roughshod over the broken update files. so, the operating system goes looking for a file in the activation process, and it can't find it, and it bluescreens; i may claim that i wouldn't otherwise need to look for that file, but as i can't turn the activation off, i'm forced to leave the file in place.

i'm otherwise going to load the thing back up on the laptop, tweak it as best as i can and then clone it away somewhere. 

i'm not a slow learner - i understand that i need to get used to this. so, hopefully that image will be easy to clone and easy to reinsert, so that when i do need to do this again, it's a thoughtless process.