I have a Western Digital 4TB drive that has 2TB of material from my previous gen Tablo. I did a factory reset on the new 4th Gen by pressing the reset button until the light went off, used the iPhone app to find the “new” Tablo (with no hard drive attached), rescanned, and went to “Storage”, which showed only the internal storage amount. I then plugged in the WD drive, and the Tablo storage showed the partially filled drive again, with no option to format it. Windows cannot see the drive to reformat it. What do I do to recover the full 4TB of the drive?
Even though Windows can’t see data on the drive, you should still be able to delete the partition via disk management found in the control panel (and format to NTFS if you want). Then attach back to Tablo, should prompt to format.
Note that deleting the partition in Windows will delete anything on the drive (no undo!).
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To clarify, my computer chirps when I plug the drive in, but W11 (Home) Finder does not show any drive at all, so there’s no partition to delete. I went to Settings>>System>>Storage and see only my C and D drives. Looked everywhere in Advanced Storage Setting, but nothing of use. In Settings, I searched for and got a screen called “Disk Management”, but it could see nothing. So I’m still stumped.
Right click the Windows start to bring up a menu of commands, select Disk Management. You should see the drive in the list , but it won’t have a drive letter. You probably need to be signed in with an Admin account.
I think the Disk Management app you accessed is the right one. A scrollable list of drives should show in the bottom pane.
I did find a Western Digital Utilities app that could see the drive and reformat it (I used the NTFS option). I did a factory reset on the Tablo and attached the reformatted drive, and it showed “100%” available, so I think it’s fixed. I would expect your technique would work as well, but I have no way of testing it, now that my drive is working properly again. Thanks for taking the time to help me. I appreciate it very much…Jack
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The white 4th gen Tablo uses EXT4 formatting, so I would definitely make sure you go to your settings and reformat it for proper use. I had an NTSF reformatted SSD reformatted in the app in order to use it.