Ripper from Hard-Drive connected directly to a PC

Tablo Apps Third Party Apps (Rippers etc.)
1

I have a Tablo that is experiencing troubles. If I boot it withOUT the Hard-Drive, it appears to be fine. If I then connect the Hard-Drive, it becomes unresponsive - not immediately - The Hard-Drive shows up on various apps, but after a couple of minutes, it’s DEAD, and won’t even react to a RESET button push. If I take the Hard-Drive to my Linux box, it looks fine, and I can see all those tiny files, and have even played a few. So, I think the Hard-Drive is OK.

And I have also tried a new Power Wart.

I have submitted a ticket and await their response.

But, if it turns out that the Hard-Drive has a problem that only shows up on the Tablo, then I will have to buy a new Drive. If that is the case, how do I get the shows off the “bad” Drive ??? I know of a few “Rippers”, and regularly use “tablo2go”. Is there a “Direct” way of transferring the shows ???

2

I guess the first thing would be to check the SMART data on the hard drive to make sure there are no issues. It’s probably easiest to do while you have the drive attached to your Linux box.

Not sure what file system Tablo uses, but after that you could do a file system integrity check (fsck?) and if that reports clean, you could possibly look at just cloning the hard drive?

That way you wouldn’t have to worry about all the Tablo-specific data on the hard drive.

Which brings me to thinking that the Tablo isn’t a good repository for shows I want to keep long-term and that I’m going to have to look at getting shows I value on to my NAS and Plex.

3

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, this Drive does not support SMART. Just to be sure I was using SMART correctly, I hooked up a newer drive, and it did indeed show the SMART stuff.

I had put my Tablo into Heart-Beat-Mode. Tablo got back to me and had seen that my logs indicated seeing the Drive, but that it did not fully spin up. They suggested hooking the Drive to a HUB, then to the Tablo. I tried that at lunch, but that didn’t work.

I eagerly await a new TabloTV response :slight_smile:

4

You used a powered hub, right?

5

Yes, but thanks for your thought. It would have been good if I had been that lame :slight_smile:

6

The bottom line is that there must have been a corrupt file on the Hard Drive.

) Used clonezilla to clone the 500GB Drive to a new 1.5TB Drive.
) This resulted in the same Death as before.
) Took Tablo Mother Board out of the case and inspected it ( very small components - maybe even SMD 0201 ).
I didn’t see anything that looked bad.
) I put the Board in a Solvent bath for a bit and let it dry out. I put it all back together.
) Same sad result.
) I formatted the 1.5TB Drive to NTFS, and let the Tablo have at it.
) That was it !!! Tablo offered to format the Drive, I did that and it succeeded.
) I didn’t go through the rest of the setup, but rather did a Factory Reset ( since all my data was lost anyway ).
) Everything looks fine now !

I live in Florida with many lightning strikes, and with that, AC power problems. I have to guess at that ???

So, now I still have that 500GB Drive that has shows on it that I’m not all broken up about, but it sure seems like there must be a way to extract them.

Thanks, Kurt

7

So is there ANY good solution to getting Tablo recordings off a hard drive? Most of the threads in here deal with ripping recording off the hard drive that is still connected to the Tablo. I EFF’d up and held the reset button down while troubleshooting issues with my Tablo. Turns ONLY the the switch port for the Tablo reconfigured itself to disabled after a power fluctuation. Everything else was working on the network so I had no reason to believe it was a connectivity issue. Anyway, after holding the reset button in I then had to re-set up my Tablo and none of my recorded shows appear in the “Recording” section.

So I need to figure out how to get these shows off the Hard Drive while plugged into a Windows 10 PC!!

8

There is no easy, simple way. If you can figure out what filesystem the Tablo format the drive with, you should be able to get a Windows version that can allow you to read the file. Maybe one of the more Linux-knowledgeable folks can help with that and steps after mounting the drive on Windows

You could also try submitting a trouble ticket to Tablo and see if they can lend a hand. Might be they have a procedure, since you can’t be the first guy this happens to. .

9

Were you able to figure this out? I’m trying to get the recordings off my old HD after I botched my switch over to a larger one. I’m frustrated that there is no support for something like this.

10

I would be frustrated too, but keep in mind no other standalone DVR I know of has a feature that would support recovery of recordings from an old hard drive after a factory reset.

11

I am in the same boat as several posters here. Something must be subtly corrupt with my Tablo database. I’ve got a hard drive full of 3,000 (!) recordings which Tablo sees and plays (and Tablo Ripper can rip) for about one-and-a-half recordings. The Tablo then crashes, the hard drive (independently powered) shuts down. I have to unplug the hard drive from the Tablo and reboot the Tablo, then re-connect the hard drive to get back up. Rinse and repeat.

I have successfully cloned the drive - same result. I have loaded both the original and the cloned hard drives onto a second, factory reset Tablo which then uploads the database from the hard drive. Same result with the fresh Tablo. I conclude the problem has to be subtle in the Tablo database or some even more obscure issue with whatever Tablo reviews on the hard drive. The second Tablo operates perfectly for weeks with a different, newly formatted (by the Tablo) hard drive, but always crashes if working with the original/cloned drive.

So the old hard drive contents (original or cloned) cannot be ripped for more than one or sometimes two programs at a time without disconnect and reboot. Pretty obviously, that process is not viable for 3,000 recordings (well, 2,090 or so after all my testing!).

So, I need some kind of program to pull and rip directly off the hard drive, bypassing the Tablo.

Incidentally, the recordings are on Tablo firmware .16, but seem readable by .18 and .20. Haven’t tried .22.

I can see the hard drive recordings and play them on both a Linux box and Windows 10 (using an EXT3/EXT4 reader - not using bash). But I don’t know any program that can read the Tablo segments per program and assemble them into one file in order, let alone maintain the metadata (series, program numbering, name, etc.). The need to convert to, e.g., MP4 could be handled separately if necessary. I’m not a scriptwriter, so I can’t write one.

Essentially what would be ideal would be if Tablo Ripper read the database not from the Tablo but the hard drive directly and operated on the hard drive through the host computer (if the hard drive was network mapped to the computer for access).

Anybody have any thoughts on a solution?

12

Sorry, Nope :frowning: I gave up and just used the new drive.
The best way I can see it to work in Linux. The directory structure is something like :
/pvr\rec\364780\segs\00000.ts … 00001.ts … etc.
The “364780” folder contains all the segments for that individual show.
So, there are different “364780” folders for each show.
These .ts segments would have to be merged together.
Elsewhere on the drive are files that contain things like meta-data and thumbnails.
So, you would have to peer into some of these files to get an idea of what show is being looked at so you could give a name to the file you create when you do that merge.

Like I said, I gave up, sorry - Kurt

13

Trying to revive an old thread here.

I have the same issue. I unknowingly reset my Tablo to get it to recognize a new drive. Now I am unable to access 1.5TB of shows on the Tablo. All of the data is still on the old hard drive (also copied to new harddrive).

I am open to either a Windoesn’t or linux solution, and I am fairly comfortable in linux command line. I am not a coder, but am willing to give anything a shot.

My ultimate wish would be to have the recordings available to my Plex server.

Anyone with a solution?

14

I actually have something that works, but it’s :
) too klunky for the average user
) too lame for a sophisticated user.

It’s a .c program I wrote that looks for all the directories, then looks into the .meta file, then creates a name for a file that means something you can recognize.

You need to compile it with something like MinGW.

15

Anybody got a tool for this? My Tablo died and the new Tablo sadly isn’t restoring the HDD database as described in the Support Docs. I attached the drive to my PC, mounted the EXT4 filesystem, and can see all the files. I can easily peruse and even manually merge the TS files, but I’ve got hundreds of recordings and don’t have the time to go through each one manually. A tool that can at least scan and list all the recordings in some human legible manner would help a lot.

17
18

Unfortunately that doesn’t help me. I already know how to find and merge the recording segments. My issue is that I have 1000+ recordings with no way way to identify which ones are important.

19

If the drive has /db directory, the “backup” DB for the tablo… it’s in there. Supposedly tablo creates this, when ever? I know it does at reboots, and it’s unclear if/when it ever does randomly.

It, used to move your recordings form one tablo to another. (I found this to work, without trying while resetting tablos and swapping drives, if you don’t delete the db, it “restores” instead of resets)

If your device doesn’t restore as indicated, you may not even have a backed up DB. How ever if you do, and really really want to get the info. Unless you know how to query sqlite or parse exported data… 100s or 1000s of “important” (trusting a single device!?) is a PITA.

Look in the Recording table, objectType = recEpisode It looks like the key json is the same data tablo stores per recording, objectID is likely the “pvr” directory

20

Unfortunately my Tablo died randomly and after looking it seems to have not kept a backup DB directory on the drive as far as I can tell. Why a periodic backup of the DB wasn’t automatically made by the Tablo, I don’t know. I’ve been using the Tablo for 5 years and wasn’t expecting that the recording information wasn’t being stored on the drive with the recordings anymore.

This is a family DVR, so it wasn’t practical for me to automatically rip important recordings of my other family members since they often set things to record that they feel they might be interested in but probably won’t care about. So the end result is 1000+ recordings that I’d have to sift through in order to find what they’ve told me they actually care about.

Guess I might be SOL.

21

Might be worth trying a new power supply before you give up.

If you have one with similar specs you can see if that revives it before getting one: