Storage drive suddenly won't connect

I’ve had an external 1TB USB hard drive connected to our Tablo Dual Lite for a few months with no issues. It has plenty of recordings on it, but only ~400GB storage has been used. In fact, it recorded a sports broadcast about 5 hours ago.

However, now it won’t show on the Tablo nor allow me to watch any recordings. I’ve replugged it in a couple of times, rebooted the Tablo device, reconnected cables; but nothing works. I’m on a Mac computer, therefore I used the awesome Tablo Tools to see if it can mount. The directory/recordings listing comes up, but again, it can’t find the drive to copy files.

Any ideas on what can be done to get Tablo to reconnect the drive? Hate to lose all these recordings, some of which are very special.

I would try a different USB cable if you haven’t already.

Does the drive spin up when you plug it in?

The other thing that comes to mind is maybe a weak power supply. If you have a powered USB hub that could be something to try.

Thanks for the advice! Yes, I tried 2 other cables but no change. Each time I plug the drive into Tablo, I hear/feel the drive spin up as well as hear the disk platter being initially read.

Likewise, I can see the drive w/in the Mac Disk Utility app when I plug it into the desktop computer. However, the Tablo format won’t allow for it to be read/mounted natively on the Mac. But it’s there!

At the very least, I’d like to be able to copy those recordings off of it before I reformat or even toss the drive. I saw this article about how to transfer an existing drive to retain previous recordings. This might work if I do a full factory reset of my Tablo device first: https://support.tablotv.com/hc/en-us/articles/213345486-Moving-your-recordings-to-a-new-Tablo

Maybe, one note: This process involves tapping the blue (reboot) button prior to removing the drive. This initiates creating a backup of the db guide/meta data. So if your drive isn’t recognized it may not create one, an old one may already to be there.

Insight, you keep seeing your “recordings” etc currently, all this is stored internally on the tablo, not the drive. If you could boot your system with a live Linux system or some Mac tool to view the contents of the drive… see if it’s otherwise readable. You could possibly salvage recordings.

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