I'm not sure if this is a bad drive. What happens when you try to watch live TV? What do you see on the screen? What model TiVo do you have?

I have a similar problem with one of my DirecTV Phillips 704 units.

Last week, one unit would reboot (seemingly at random) and then continue fine.
Yesterday, the picture began to freeze/skip/play/freeze, etc. while watching live TV.

I opened the case and found the worst case of dust (I bought it used a year ago) that I have seen. I blew it out (NO vacuum) and tried it again. Same problem.

Since I have the original drive from my other 704 (which I upgraded with a WK kit a year ago,) I figured I would try the old drive in the uncooperative unit.

Live TV is fine, but gave an error screen when attempting to record that said a hardware problem is preventing recording or watching recorded programs.

What do you think?

The hardware problem is resolved if you do a "clear and delete everything" from the system reset menu. You can't move drives from one DIRECTV DVR to another without taking that step.