Kaboing problems

I've run into problems with Kaboing, the Pogoplug I picked up and have been slowly prepping for use as my home web/email/SSH server. First, it stopped recognizing the USB stick that had the root filesystem, and would boot into the stock Pogoplug environment instead...which is still Linux, but not my Linux.

I tried installing the root on another USB stick, thinking that the old one was, well, old (it was one of n I have lying around the house). But that didn't work either: I still kept getting the Pogoplug environment instead. I tried removing extra sticks (I had three attached), leaving me with just one (new) stick and an external USB hard drive; still didn't work.

After much futzing about, I got it down to this behaviour: every other warm reboot works, mostly. By that I mean that every second warm reboot seems to detect at least the USB stick with the root FS, and sometimes the external hard drive, and boots up into my Linux (running Debian, natch); the other times, the stick(s) aren't detected and the plug decides to boot into the Pogoplug Linux instead.

I'm not the only one who's tripped over this. I've tried various things and haven't come up with a solution yet. I think an awful hack will be to put some kind of timed reboot into the Pogoplug environment. But I don't like that idea very much, and I wish I knew what was going on.