hey chris--
i was about to suggest that you send us your kern.log, but then
i realized that you're not even getting to the point of having
your root filesystem mounted rw :{
i'd suggest reconfiguring and re-compiling your kernel with kernel
debugging cranked all the way up to see if you can find where the
error is during the boot process. alternatively, you could also try
removing the patches half at a time and recompiling until you find the
culprit kernel patch, but that's a little uglier... are you sure all
the patches are for the proper version of the kernel?
--sean