I just upgraded from a legacy 4 tuner to a 4th gen 2 tuner Tablo. I plugged the old usb hard drive into the new 4th gen device. It recognized the drive without issue but it can’t see the old recordings. Since the drive was mostly full of recordings it thinks it can only use the last 2% of the drive. Is there a way to tell Tablo to format the drive and reclaim the rest of the space? I don’t care about losing the old recordings.
Bonus points if this can be done without physically accessing the hard drive or the Tablo. Its all in the attic (only place my antenna gets a signal because of my metal siding) and really a pain to access.
Did it not prompt you to format when you connected it for the first time?
Unfortunately, I do not know of any way to re-format a drive through the Tablo 4th Gen. The only way I know to do it is to connect the drive to a computer and reformat it, the put it back on the Tablo and it should prompt you to format it to work with the Tablo. Also, it is in a Linux format (EXT4?) so whatever computer you connect it to has to be able to work with that format. Most Windows-based machines do not without some finagling.
Thanks all. I enabled auto-delete and recorded a bunch of shows overnight in an attempt to fill up the drive and trigger some kind of cleanup. This morning I deleted the shows I recorded and now the drive is showing 100% available. So I’m not sure if the auto-delete feature caused the cleanup or if there’s a scheduled clean up, but either way it fixed itself overnight. Thanks for the support.
Sounds sketchy. I would still take the time while it’s empty to reformat the drive on a computer before then formatting it in the Tablo. I’d hate for your workaround to fail you in the future.
@JRHagy - If you don’t have Linux, you can probably reformat it on a Windows or Mac computer to NTFS, exFAT or something those OS’s understand (not sure about Mac). The TabloTV Gen4 should reformat it to EXT4 automagically. However, I tend to leave things be if they’re working.
For reference, it appears that Western Digital uses a combination of exFAT, NTFS, APFS, and HFS+ on their drives.
It was never necessary to connect a drive to a Windows PC and complexly format it to get tablo to recognize it for a fresh format. Just delete the partition. If you have software to access it, delete the dot, hidden files in the root directory. It is way so much quicker. I believe you can also change the UUID, tablo stores this info.
How much this changed with the inferior units is unclear.