SOLVED: Pink Pogoplug will only boot from ROM

[meaninglessvanity]

My pink Pogoplug stopped booting correctly off of the boot disk. I can mount the boot flash drive from within the ROM Linux. I tried to delete everything from the /var/log directory on my flash drive, then boot off of it so I could see if anything was failing. After I couldn't SSH to it, I restarted with the ROM Linux, inserted and mounted the flash drive and there was nothing in the log directory.

So, I tried a fresh install on a different flash drive, and it *still* only boots to ROM. When I try to boot with my flash drives inserted it doesn't seem to want to do much. I can't SSH to it, and it doesn't even try to DHCP according to my router.

SOLUTION
The problem was that I had a hard disk which can only get power over USB. I remembered reading in the kernel logs that the front connection was on its own bus and that the back ones were together on their own bus. The disk only worked on the front plug. With the disk on the back plug I think I was drawing too much current in total from the USB bus. I don't know that for 100% but it makes sense.