External HDD Issues

Support & Troubleshooting
#1

I have a Seagate 750 GB 2.5 inch HDD in an enclosure. I’ve used it successfully as an external hard drive for several years.

Since I had it as a spare, I removed any unique data from it and connected it to the Tablo Dual 64 GB DVR Tuner that I’ve had for a couple weeks. It SEEMED to format OK, but now, each time I fire up Tablo on my FireTV Stick, it says I need to format the HDD…

I’ve done that a number of times and NOW, it just keeps giving me that message, so I disconnected the HDD. BTW, due to issues, I’ve had to restart my Tablo several times, so I thought that THIS would clear things up.

I knew that the Tablo format is different from my Win 10 format, so I connected it to two different Win 10 computers, intending to format it for Windows 10 again, and THEN reattach it to the Tablo. Well, no such luck: neither computer will recognize or find this Ext HDD, no matter what I do.

So, it seems that I’ve taken a perfectly good and working Ext HDD and ruined it with Tablo. I cannot get it to work with Tablo, nor with my Win 10 computers. I have other Ext HDDs, but no way in HELL am I willing to make them useless as well, and I do NOT want to buy a new one and ruin it.

So, what am I doing wrong?

OH, and AFAIK, nothing from my OTA signal was actually recorded onto the Ext HDD… Am I correct in assuming that the 64 GB of internal memory on the Tablo fill up first, then use an Ext HDD if one’s attached and formatted?

Help!

Thanks.

#2

Older hard drives have sleep issues Tablo can’t deal with.

Since the Tablo initialized, and formatted the hard drive that is foreign to MS Windows 10, you probably need to reinitialize the drive via ‘Computer Management’ -> ‘Disk Management’.
If ‘Disk Management’ can’t see that drive, then there’s something else seriously wrong.

Also, try a different USB port on your computer, cuz sometimes USB device configuration gets messed up on one port.

#3

As @Radojevic noted, ‘Disk Management’ should reveal the drive and allow you to reformat it.

The Tablo will record either the internal storage, or the external disk. We go over the details of how this works here.

#4