My SSD for the ThinkPad arrived, so I pulled the drive from the machine and using a separate machine to dd the contents of the existing drive onto the new one. It being a 1-tb drive on both ends, it took a few hours. dd reported success.
I put the new SSD into the machine and booted it. I was happy to see it booted readily. I was less happy to see what happened next.
I got to the nice graphical login window. I typed in my password. Screen went black with a mouse pointer, then after a few seconds returned to the login screen. Damn, I thought. So I shut down and reinstalled the original drive.
And guess what? *Same thing*! Perfectly working installation has now lost the contents of its /home partition. Only thing there is /lost+found. This on the original drive, which dd shouldn't have touched at all.
To say I am at a loss is an understatement. Everything else seems to work.
Any informed guesses?