We weren't able to complete the data copy here, which suggests the old drive had problems. Were you not experiencing any issues with the old drive?

The problems I was experiencing that caused me to upgrade were quite different. The machine would just freeze and reboot. When it was functioning, there were no problems with picture or audio quality.

What it's doing now is very different. It is definitely new behavior, and definitely manifest "out of the box" when I got it back. The primary reasons I suspect it's not the cable is that it seems to be recording-specific. In other words, it never happens with live TV, and a recording either has really bad instances of the problem throughout the recording or it does not. Channel seems to have no correlation.

Perhaps related, but not a problem per se, is whenever I go between TiVo menus and live or recording television, I get a similar 'smearing' of the pixels. This, too, is new. It happens very, very briefly, but seems to be similar in look to the problem I'm experiencing.

That's all pretty strange.

The TiVo is really always recording, even with live TV (that's how you can pause anytime). So the fact that it doesn't happen on live TV may just be coincidental.

The fact that even the menus smear is something I just haven't seen before. Is it possible that this is somehow related to a cabling issue between the TV and the TiVo?

If you replay a bad segment on a show, is it exactly the same the second time, or does it morph each time?

To be fair, we don't watch a ton of live TV. Given that's it's happening on about 1 in 5 shows we're watching, it's not impossible that we just haven't encountered it during live(-ish) viewing.

It is always the same. Paying attention tonight, I also noticed that audio drop-outs (always very brief - fraction of a second) are more common and always repeatable. It seems pretty certain its in the recording.

I just re-tightened the cable on the tuning adapter (we have a dual cable card and a tuning adapter), as well as the connection from the tuning adapter to the TiVo. The connection from wall -> tuning adapter had about two screws before coming tight, so maybe that's it; the connection from tuning adapter -> TiVo was fully tightened.

It happens frequently enough that I should know within the week if it's resolved. I'll keep an eye on things recorded after tonight for any issues.

Any other ideas in the meantime?

OK - in general, if problems are repeatable, that means that either the incoming source or the on-board tuner is the problem; the hard drive is just recording whatever bad info it was given.

See how it goes with the tightened connections. Hopefully, that's all there is to it.

We haven't experienced any problems since tightening the cord, so I've chalked it up to that (with a healthy dose of user error as well). Thanks again for the help.