This morning I turned on my TV and tried to watch the morning news, and the Tablo disconnected. Tried it several times and each time, I observed the Tablo reboot.
Figuring (hoping) it might be the power supply, I rummaged through my box of old power supplies to see if I had anything close. The specs on the Tablo wall wart are 12V/2A, and I found one that was 12V/2.5A. As an added bonus, the DC connector was an exact match for the Tablo.
Plugged it in and the Tablo booted up normally. I connected to it via my Roku and it seemed to be working. Unfortunately, Tablo rebooted shortly thereafter. Thinking that maybe it’s the tuners causing a problem, I tried watching some recorded content. But I found that after Tablo has been on for a while, even connecting to it causes it to reboot.
So, this morning I started looking for the Tablo Quad, hoping to replace my old 4 tuner model. No joy… sold out everywhere.
So for now, I think I’ll hook an antenna directly to the TV and try to order the new Quad as soon as they become available again. My backup plan is to take advantage of Hulu for catching shows I’ve missed, maybe get a CBS all access pass for a month or so, and then when I get the new Quad, hopefully be able to migrate the old hard drive over.
In the meantime, I might try opening up the Tablo and see if there’s anything obvious like a failing internal power supply that I might be able to repair… putting my old EE skills to use.
Maybe it’s caused by your old hard drive? They don’t always go out with a big bang.
But it is a good excuse to buy a new quad. I keep waiting for my old units to die. Even my 5 year old disks seem to be holding up. It seems that my old Roku 3 may die before my tablo.
Looks like removing the hard drive stopped my reboot issue. I can only tune to one channel now, not have multiple tuners going at the same time. Maybe that’s normal with no hard drive?
Going to do some more testing, starting with plugging the hard drive back in. If it turns out to be a hard drive issue, hopefully I can copy/clone the contents of my old drive on to a new one.
Thanks for the quick reply… been working without the hard drive for some time now, so it really looks like that’s it. Would not have thought it to be a hard drive issue.
The hard drive is powered by the Tablo… just tried the other USB port and it worked for a little while and then rebooted. I’ll look and see if I have an old USB hub laying around somewhere to try.
one note, if your drive is “dying”, not dead and you can’t do any diagnostic via pc you may let it rest until you get a replacement, if you plan to copy it’s contents… you can’t be sure how much life it has left.
chances are, this may not be an issue… you’ll have to weight the risks
Usually when something breaks I assume first it is the thing with a motor before the thing that is circuitry.
A board component can always fail, but usually something spinning breaks first.
Tried using a powered hub for my hard drive, after testing it first to make sure my computer was able to read a standard USB flash drive through the USB hub, so I know the hub is good.
Unfortunately, the Tablo is unable to see the hard drive through the hub. It can only tune one channel at a time for live TV, and doesn’t see the attached storage when I try to play something recorded.
After watching live TV for a couple of hours with no drive attached, I’m pretty convinced that I likely have a hard drive issue, tho it’s possible the Tablo’s USB ports are bad. Anyway, hopefully, I can transfer the contents to a new drive.
The Tablo should be able to see it through the powered USB hub. I assume the USB hub is powered separately right? It’s not powered by just the USB cable?
Exactly… the USB hub is powered. I checked to make sure data works with my computer and a spare USB flash drive. For some reason, Tablo couldn’t see the hard drive through the hub.
I bet for the technically challenged, we just called “bad drive”.
Ok, when I search for drive on ebay I often add -(pcb) because there are apparently a big market for replacements, as you state.
Kind of wondering, if you know, how do you determine this? That is, the determine the board needs replaced to salvage things. Just swapping - trial and error is generally the poor man’s method, but I don’t see that working here.
Ordered a 4TB WD Elements drive from Amazon, with 2 day delivery. Should get it on Monday. When it comes, I’m going to do a factory reset and start over from scratch. In the meantime, I’m using Tablo Ripper to try to pull some of my unwatched recordings off the drive. I keep getting timeouts as Tablo resets and have to restart the downloads, but I have successfully downloaded over half a dozen shows so far.
