Thumb drive appliance, only booted once? then corrupt.

[Freemyer]

All,

I built a thumb drive appliance:

http://susestudio.com/a/eD1wrT/dfir-opensuse-gnome-desktop-32bit

I downloaded the v0.0.3 version yesterday and dd'ed it to a 4GB thumb.

I booted it once and did some testing.  I was able to login, mount
/dev/sdb2, etc.

Today, when I try to boot it again, it fails saying one of the initial
files grub needs can't be found.

Is this a known problem?  Anything I can do to make this work better?

fyi: I just repeated the dd operation, so it's back to virgin for now.

Thanks
Greg