I don't know if anyone cares but this may help someone else out there.

I was able to get the system to boot again. I used the serial console and fortunately it was setup with have a bash console with earlier hacks. During the boot process I was able to enter

 kill 7

  PID  Uid     VmSize Stat Command
    1 root        424 S   init
    2 root            SW  [keventd]
    3 root            SWN [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
    4 root            SW  [kswapd]
    5 root            SW  [bdflush]
    6 root            SW  [kupdated]
    7 root       1204 S   /bin/bash /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
    9 root       1208 S   /bin/bash -login
   18 root            SW  [khubd]
   63 root        796 S   /sbin/syslogd -p /var/dev/log -m 10000
   65 root        652 S   /sbin/klogd
   67 root        868 D   /sbin/insmod /lib/modules/cobra.o gLnbSetLLC18=1
   68 root        736 R   ps -ef
 

 to stop the execution of  /bin/bash /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit script

 This allowed me to switch the bootpage

bootpage -p ; then change to hda4 or hda7 whichever wasn't the current boot partition. Then reboot.

The system still had issues booting. I would get an error with TMK assertion with tcphonehome, I replaced the /sbin/iptables file with a dummy exit and chmod 755. This seemed to address the iptables: No chain/target/match by that name error message.

It still had a TMK exception but different. I think the firewall was still enabled. 

 Tmk Assertion Failure:
    StartDaemon, line 599 ()
Tmk Fatal Error: Thread TvLauncher <101> strayed!
Paste the following into a shell to get a backtrace...

bt -t /tvbin/tivoapp <<END_OF_BT
  read 0x02000000 /lib/libc.so.6
  read 0x02200000 /lib/libm.so.6
  read 0x02400000 /lib/libpthread.so.0
  read 0x02600000 /lib/libutil.so.1
  read 0x2aaa8000 /lib/ld.so.1
  read 0x2ab04000 /lib/libdl.so.2
  0x0075c7a4 0x0075e9ac 0x00612e28 0x00403090 0x0201455c
END_OF_BT

I then ran

dhcp-enable.ptv script ; not sure what this did but after that it booted!  Perhaps this script disables the firewall and some other stuff. 

The networking is not working yet and that is next. It's not very important now that MRV is not working. I don't do much with TWP. 

 -Ross