More rover stuff.
More data (from listening to a replay of the briefing): The rover has 3 kinds of memory: RAM, Flash, EEPROM. There's a file system on the flash memory. When in cripple mode, the OS uses a ram disk instead of working with flash.
The 9:30am MARS time communications window was not there, meaning the vehicle was in low power mode; which meant the vehicle should come up at 11am. Just before 11am, they asked the rover to go into cripple mode and then asked it to reboot. It did this. Once it came up, everything that they attempted worked fine.
When the rover OS boots, sounds like it has to mount the flash file system, and it's that process that's messing up. Sounds like they need to run an fsck on the Flash. :)
The Rover is stable in power and thermal; the fault protection mechanisms are working fine, the cripple mode will let them figure out what's going on. It's low data rate, with limited functionality, but they seem confident that they can recover from this.
What was happening when it failed was “sequence 2502”, operating the elevation motor in the mast.