One little trick I had to learn here: I was trying to run the tower from an SSD. Used the default disk stuff for the Ubuntu installs on it, and on the laptop I hauled out of mothballs. The problem here is that means the exact same volume group name is on both, and they conflict when I pulled the tower's SSD and tried to mount it on the laptop to copy stuff over.
So, I had to get the UUID from vgdisplay, and then use vgrename.