As the subject says, it stopped recording. But, I have an external hard drive 1TB that is 90% empty, and shows up as such in the settings. All previous recordings on the hard drive are still accessible, so I know it’s connecting fine. What could be wrong?
Did you format the drive when you installed it in the Tablo?
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Yes, and it was working fine for many days, until one day it just stopped.
It may be viable to disconnect and reconnect your external hard drive, in case there’s an issue with the cable.
Beyond that, would you consider reaching out to our technical support team: https://tablotv.com/support/#contact?
They should be able to help.
So, I pushed the reset button on the unit, and after it restarted, it seems to be working fine. So no support call needed.
However, this (the recording stoppage) happened for the duration I was out of town. I came back hoping to catch up on my shows, but alas, no! Since I have no idea what caused the issue, I am not sure what I should do to have it not happen again.
How long have you been using that hard drive? And, just to double-check, you have an actual external hard drive, not a thumb drive?
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I set it up and used it for about 3 weeks or so, before it quit. Yes, it’s a physical USB connected spinning hard disk.
My first thoughts would be to swap out the cable. It that doesn’t solve the problem I would reformat the hard drive… I know that would loose all your programs, but it sounds like you can’t access them now anyway.
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You may need to use a computer to reformat the drive before you reformat it again on the Tablo. Otherwise, the puck may not recognize that it needs formatted.
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Ok, just to explain again, in case there is any confusion in detail:
- I connected an Iomega external hard disk, Tablo formatted it and started to record on it.
- This worked fine for about 2 to 3 weeks. I left town, and did not look at it until I got back.
- Upon return, I noticed that it had stopped recording all shows with the error message “no storage space available”. HOWEVER, all previously recorded shows on that hard drive were still perfectly viewable. Also, the hard drive showed up fine, and Tablo said it had ~900GB free.
- A couple of days later, I just tried pushing the reset button underneath the unit, without changing anything else. The device rebooted, and now works fine. It records new shows, and all the old shows recorded prior to the failure are still there. Just missing the three week period.
So, I’m just asking if Tablo or any user has any theory about what happened here, so I can rest assured that this won’t happen again! It was a bummer to come back from vacation, and not be able to catch up on favorite shows.
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Thank you for the better detailed explanation. I hope it helps to solve this issue. It’s helped me realize what you were saying and reminded me that I just went through this myself.
I’ve only experienced a delay in recordings after the power went out. Despite it showing it was connected to the internet, it was not downloading a new guide, therefor it didn’t know it was SUPPOSED to record. I had to manually reboot both Tablos for them to start recording
My power was out for about 7 hours. My wifi is on a small UPS, but not the Tablos. My guess is that because everything powered on at the same time (the UPS fully discharged), there was not a proper connection.
Just a guess, but without being there to witness what was going on it’s hard to say.
Note: I never received the “no storage space available” error, but I also did not try to schedule a recording.
This is completely different. This was for existing scheduled recordings. The guide info was correct, because it showed each episode at the proper time, with a blank recording, and an error message quoted above.
Valid point. Mine just didn’t record.
I still wonder if it might have been a power surge or other power issue. Is your external drive plugged into a power supply as well or only to the Tablo?
It seems like it stopped recognizing the external drive at some point and the reboot help it reconnect.
No. Please look at my point #3 on the previous post. While it was not recording shows, I could still access the older recordings, and it showed hard disk status just fine. After I discovered the issue I waited 3 days just to see if it would record new shows, but it did not. Also to answer your other question, it’s just powered by the USB cable not external.
If you end up contacting support on the issues, even if they happen again in the future, would you DM us your ticket numbers and reference this thread? We’d like to investigate.
Also, Krishkal, would you share with us how old your Iomega drive is?
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Thanks for the more detailed explanation. It sound like you know what you are doing, and have done all the proper trouble-shooting. Glad to hear that it is working now. Keep us posted if you have further issues.
The drive is probably ~5 years old, but has been very lightly used. I bought it to keep some backups, which have subsequently been uploaded to the cloud, so was available to use.
Trying to follow your train of thought… let’s say the drive gave a write error at one point, wouldn’t the software reset the USB bus and retry before giving up for good on writing it? Clearly, when I reset the whole unit, it started writing to the drive just fine.
I don’t intend to contact support, because I don’t have a current problem, and what are they going to do for me? Maybe you can forward the thread to the dev team, and see if it rings a bell with anyone…
If you haven’t deleted the failed recordings, they might be willing to look at your logs and see what happened. If they’re gone, though, there’s nothing they can do. I hope it doesn’t happen again.
5 years for an HDD? It might be worth spending a few bucks on an upgrade before you get too many recordings that you can’t recover. I wish you the best and hope this is the end of your HD problems.
It just came to my attention that most Windows computers may not recognize a Tablo drive since it is in a Linux format (I think ext4). Windows may need third-party applications to open and reformat it.