How to migrate to a bigger drive?

Support & Troubleshooting
14

Hi tremjo.

The method I described is a really slow / time consuming process. So yes, if you really needed to backup your Tablo recordings to another drive, I suppose this would work. I use Tablo Ripper, myself, to save recordings that I want to keep.

My Tablo started acting odd a few months back … it would record shows, but I could not schedule programs and the Live TV function stopped working. Turns out that the external HDD somehow got some bad sectors (low level stuff) on it. I had to use the technique above to copy everything recorded off of it … and in the process I found 2 recordings that got munged up … those files just would not copy to the other drive.

The external USB Drive I was using I had bought earlier this year, and just because it had a few bad sectors doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s trash. The trick to getting those bad sectors to get marked on the drive as off limits for use, is to format the drive on a PC as NTFS (I’m sure there are other ways, other operating systems that will do this too). And it has to be a full format, not the quick one … takes several hours to complete. Once that’s done, the bad sectors aught to be marked as unusable on the hard drive itself. Next step is to connect it to the Tablo, and have it format it again in the Linux format it likes. I presume that the Tablo format operation does not do the full slow sector by sector format that the PC does (but I could be wrong), but I also think that the Tablo format operation will honor the bad sector marking on the drive, and never use them.

So I did the above on that 2TB external drive, then copied all the good recordings back, and my Tablo was up and running again. Since then, I’ve not had any recording / playback issues, and all my old recordings, except for 2 were restored.

It would be nice, though, to have a straight-forward backup technique to use.

Roy

2 Likes
15

I rarely use Terminal. Can you explain to me how to do this and what it does pls.

17

Terminal is an interface to the command line. rsync is a command that you execute from the command line that will synchronize two folders.

If you’ve booted into a linux distro, once you open terminal, you would then use the rsync command:

rsync [source_directory_path] [destination_directory_path]

Depending on which distro of linux you’re booting with, the mounted drives may be at /mnt or /Volumes. If you get a message about permissions, just prepend “sudo” to the command:

sudo rsync [source_directory_path] [destination_directory_path]

18

Thanks alot for the quick reply and detailed help. I am a little shaky on this but I am going to try your procedure from your older post below. I will make a bootable flash drive and see if I boot linux on my mac mini. I would like to upgrade to 4 or 5 TB and would like to save my current shows. Cheers, Jim

19

No problem, if you run into trouble creating the bootloader, you can follow the instructions here:
https://github.com/SevenBits/Mac-Linux-USB-Loader/wiki/General-Instructions

The ubuntu distro is what I used and will probably be the easiest.

20

Worked for me as well. I’m on Windows 10 and for step 8, I had to use Ext2Mount to see the drives on Windows Explorer. Thanks for the help!

21

This worked perfectly for me upgrading from a very big noisy old 1TB WD Mybook to a sleek tiny new 2TB Seagate BackUp Plus. Your instructions were easy to follow on my aging Windows 7 laptop. The only hiccup was the 16 hours (yes, I said sixteen) it took to copy my 600GB of recordings from one to the other. I think one of the links in my chain was operating at USB 1 speed because the copying all happened at between 10 and 11 MBPS. Happily both drives and my aging laptop survived the marathon and everything is working great with all of my old recordings on the new drive.
Thanks a bunch for your post.

22

I’m getting stuck with launching the program ext2fsd. It won’t launch. Any ideas? I’m running Windows 10.

23

I’ve not tried running this procedure since I posted about it. They do mention an issue with Windows 10 along with the workaround. Did you try this?

See: http://www.ext2fsd.com/?p=182

BabbleBits

24

I haven’t had a chance to try that yet. Would that affect the program even running? I wonder. I’ll let you know how that goes.

25

@BabbleBits I think that is an issue with the drive no showing up in the software. My software just won’t launch.

26

Nevermind. I uninstalled, re-downloaded the .exe file and now the program launches. That was weird.

27

Wow, still problems. Seems the program freezes whenever I plug in my hard drive.

28

Okay, an update from me. Seems it was an issue with my PC or the fact that I’m running Windows 10 on PC. I got everything transferred (1.48 TB of data) from the old drive to my new 3 TB drive and I spot checked a few recordings. Everything seems to have worked just fine! Thanks for the steps @BabbleBits

Took about 18-20 hours to transfer everything.

3 Likes
29

So if you plug both drives into a linux box, mount and rsync is should be that easy pretty much ?

30

Well it is now July of 2016 and this “important feature” seems to have gone by the wayside of the “roadmap”. Or did the roadmap lose its bearing? This is still an important feature to me. How about an update after 18 months. I’m not sure, but I think oldmike bit the dust also. :confounded:

1 Like
31

Bigger fish to fry…

32

Yes, that’s about all. Though, you want to plug the new drive into the Tablo first to let it format and put down some files/directories. When I migrated, I wrote down what I did here:;

1 Like
33

Thanks for the response and great directions - but I know nothing about Linux and only have a mac

34

:slight_smile: linux and the mac os are both unix variants.
At least, the mac os is a unix os variant in the background.
The pretty user interface is what most people ever see, though.
Open up a terminal window.
You have now entered your unix environment.