I did put image on new card last night. Original SD was trashed and wont take an image. Then Pi died later. Spare pi came up on the newly imaged card fine. Have more SD on order now. Hope this is just an intermittent V1 m-board thing that can be cured with a V2.
If you want to get rid of SD card problems and have a spare computer at hand, you may want to outsource the root fs to NFS and make the card read-only (i.e. only use for booting). Using a SD card as a root fs invites for problems.
To do this you have to export the root fs image on the NFS server and add something like this to the cmdline.txt on the boot partition of the SD card:
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=192.168.1.3:/var/lib/tftpboot/raspberry/192.168.1.249 rootfstype=nfs ip=192.168.1.249:192.168.1.3:192.168.1.1:255.255.255.0:raspberry249:eth0:off:192.168.1.1