You have given some details of what you have tried to do to fix the problem, but I don't really see much description of the original problem. I would be interested to know what happens if you just restart the TiVo normally. As part of the restart it should automatically do a file system check (fsck) for the root file system and /var. That might take longer than usual if it needs to do some file system repairs (which should happen automatically if the file system problems are relatively minor).