Here’s how I went about upgrading my Tablo’s external hard drive to a larger size drive without loosing previously recorded shows. It was pretty easy to do. My original drive was 256 MB, the new external HDD is 2 TB in size.
I’m using a PC running Windows 8.1 though I think that older versions of Windows will work OK too.
I did the following to accomplish the migration:
-
removed the smaller Tablo USB External Hard Drive from the Tablo.
- inserted the new 2 terabyte USB external hard drive into the Tablo.
- Tablo saw a new external drive and indicated that it needed to be formatted (which will wipe anything previously on that drive clean off) in the Tablo Settings web page. I typed the word FORMAT and it began formatting the new drive.
- When formatting was finished I removed the new external drive from the Tablo and then plugged both the old small external usb drive and the newly formatted large external usb drive into my PC.
- I downloaded and installed a Windows to Linux disk utility called Ext2Fsd and installed it.
- I started the Ext2Fsd program, found the two external hard drives listed along with all the windows drives. The two Tablo usb drives were listed as “ext3” Linux drives. (Note that in my case, the Ext2Fsd startup-splash screen … silhouette of a couple of penguins with a sunset-color background … stayed open. I have enough screen real estate to work around that screen, but I was not able to close it … perhaps there was something I missed, but I didn’t dwell on it for very long, I just left it be).
- Using Ext2Fsd, I assigned new Windows drive letters to the two external hard drives. The small drive became the “D:” drive, and the large drive became “E:”.
- Using Windows Explorer, I was able to open and view the contents of both drives … the D: drive and the new E: drive in my case.
- I opened the “rec” folder listed in the D: drive and opened a new Windows Explorer window to view the new E: drive (the new 2 TB external usb drive) and I opened its “rec” folder as well, which was empty.
- I then dragged & dropped all the folders in the “rec” drive from the small drive (D: in my case) into the same folder, “rec”, in the new large external (E:) drive.
- After a couple hours of copying, all the recordings in the “rec” folder from the small drive were now cloned into the “rec” folder of the new drive.
- In Ext2Fsd, I right-clicked on the E: drive and selected the command for flushing any cached data to the drive.
- I then dismounted the two usb drives by selecting the usb plug symbol in the Windows Notification Icons area. The icon on my computer was hidden, so to find it I selected the little right-arrow to view all notification icons. The one I selected was called “Safely remove hardware and eject media”. I ejected my D: and E: drive (your drive letters may be different from mine).
- All done! I plugged the new 2 TB drive into the Tablo. Tablo recognized it as a fully functioning drive (since it was the Tablo that formatted it in the first place) … and all of the previously recorded shows were present and playable.
It really wasn’t difficult … it just took some time to format the new drive and copy the recordings from old to new.
Post back here if you found this helpful.
Roy