My old 4 tuner Tablo died this morning

I’ve submitted a ticket asking support this question, but thought I’d ask here as well. My new hard drive arrives tomorrow, and I’ve already recovered most of the recorded programs I want via Tablo Ripper so copying them to the new drive isn’t an issue since the drive is hosed anyway (Using extfs, I was unable to mount the drive).

I’d like to keep my current Tablo configuration as far as channel scan, subset of those channels that appear in the guide, recording schedules, etc., so I don’t want to do a factory reset unless I have to.

Now I understand that when I plug in the new drive I’ll be asked to format it, and at that point, I should be good to go. However, under recordings, the thumbnails of recorded programs will still show up, even tho the recordings will no longer exist on the hard drive.

Will those thumbnails auto-delete during overnight maintenance, or can I manually delete them? Is there another way? I know that doing a factory reset will delete them, but I’ll lose all my configuration settings.

So, when installing a new drive, what’s the best way to delete the thumbnails? Thx.

You can use Tablo Ripper to delete all of the recordings on the old drive which will then clear the database on the Tablo so that you are ready to go when the new drive arrives.

I just factory reset the thing, not that hard to redo the one time setup. It’s kind of like a clean install of Windows, it’s needed once in a while.

I thought of that, but there are two problems. When ripping recordings, the Tablo often resets, so I was lucky to get what I could. It was a painful process. Also, I have a lot of recordings on the Tablo, most of which I don’t need, and with all the reboots, it would take forever to go through the process and likely would not be successful. Using the verify feature of Paragon’s extfs for Windows, it’s showing my hard drive is corrupted, so I don’t think there’s much more I can do with Tablo as far as the drive goes.

Looks like I may have found my solution to the thumbnails. With the hard drive detached, I went into the recordings section and selected delete all for each thumbnail. That seems to have wiped all the thumbnails from the recordings screen.

Yea, but clean install of windows isn’t all that quick and painless.

But have you truly found a necessity to factory reset your tablo once in a while?

The only time I’ve had to do a factory reset of Tablo was in the very early days. I had a problem with corrupted data in the guide that looked like gibberish. A factory reset fixed my guides issue. But until yesterday, my Tablo has been virtually flawless for 4 years. I haven’t had to do a factory reset since.

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I had the same issues with my old 4 tuner tablo. Once I replaced the drive it has been like new again. I hope the drive is your issue.

@lkahhan Let us know if the new new drive doesn’t do the trick. We can take a look at the logs and see what’s up.

Got my new drive (WD Elements 4TB) a short time ago, and had to figure out how to force a format on it. Turns out you can’t just plug it in, nor plug it in and power cycle. The correct procedure is to plug it in while powered up or down, after Tablo boots, quickly depress and release the blue reset button. When I went to the Tablo on the web browser, I got the screen asking me if I wanted to format the drive, and had to type Format in the box. Took a minute to realize case was important, as it was asking me to type FORMAT and after typing F, it didn’t like ORMAT, just ormat.

It took just a minute or so to format the drive and I was up and running. As I noted previously, I had deleted all recordings thumbnails, and was able to retain all my channel scan, recording settings, etc. So far, it’s looking pretty good. I can have multiple channels going at the same time once again, and no more constant reboots. I’m going to leave my replacement power supply plugged in, because it’s a little heftier than the one that came with Tablo, and I’ll relegate the original power supply to backup status.

If anyone’s interested, the formatted capacity of the new hard drive is 3.94 TB. This is much more than I need, as my old 2 TB drive never got more than about 25-30% full with my usage patterns, but I was able to get a good deal from Amazon and it’s better to have the extra storage capacity and not need it rather than need it and not have it. The old drive lasted about 4 years, and I’ll be happy if I get at least that much with the new one.

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