Did you use -D / --directory option to journalctl? It switches the tool from "do the common thing and inspect live system" mode to "do exactly what I want and j

Did you use -D / --directory option to journalctl? It switches the tool from "do the common thing and inspect live system" mode to "do exactly what I want and just convert files in that directory to text". There is also "--file" option for one-file-at a time access, but it is harder to use. In particular, I have just verified with "strace" that running journalctl with either "-D /var/log/journal" or "--file" option does not even open machine-id file nor a d-bus socket -- so whatever problems you had with machine-id would be gone with. Also, when you said, that you "cp'ed the files off it", did you mean you copied off the contents of /var/log/journal? Were you able to open the files on the other machine?