Tablo dual lite dvr messed up new 2 tv hdd

Recently purchased a tablo dual lite dvr. Initially used a 64 gb flash (although i know it’s not recommended) and seemed to work good. Decided to get as external 2tb 3.0 hdd so i purchased a NEW drive. I checked it on my laptop and it worked fine. factory formatted to FAT 32. When plugging it into Tablo it asked the normal format? after typing in “format” it started to format, then STOPPED. Will not format. I rechecked the hdd on 2 computers and neither will recognize the hdd.

Your Tablo formats the drive with the EXT4 format, which isn’t readable on windows computers without a special driver/software. If you have a computer that runs Linux operating system it should be able to read and/or format the drive.

Have you read the following article? It gives you a step-by-step process on how to switch from a flash drive to a harddrive.

You can attach the drive to Windows and format with NTFS. Then attach back to the Tablo, should prompt to format to EXT4 again.

Thanks for the response. I tried the suggested method. After the tablo rebooted and typed “format” tablo regonized the 2tb hdd, it blinked 2x and i got the same message. (type Format and hdd blinked 2x). Don’t have access to a linux system however. Thanks for your suggestion.

This was my initial thought but when i plugged the hdd into my laptop the laptop beeped but it did not show up as a drive, or ask if i wanted to format it. Neither did it show up in the device manager. Thanks for the suggestion. Flash drive works great on the tablo just can’t save a lot on it.

Thanks for the clarification. Not Windows not recognizeing it as a drive is necessarily the same as the PC/Windows recognizing it.

If you plug your drive into a Windows PC and it is initially not recognized you can open “Disk Management” and look for the drive. From there if you truly want to reformat you can delete the volume associated with the drive and add a new one and format it. Be extremely careful with this method, you want to make sure you are working with the correct drive and don’t accidentally delete an important volume from your other drives. The few times I have started fresh with Tablo I used this method to delete the volume and I didn’t bother adding a new volume or formatting as Tablo always recognized a drive with no volumes defined.

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If the steps above don’t allow you to get things up and running, don’t hesitate to send our support team a note. We can setup a remote session and see if we can help you format the drive.

When i plugged the hdd into windows pc its not recognized i can open the device manager and see it. However it does not show up in the disk management. (only the main hdd and dvd drive).

the hdd is a 2TB 2…5" HDD enclosure, SATA I/II/III to USB 3.0/3.1

If you don’t see the hard drive in the Windows Disk Management it could well be that the USB enclosure circuitry or the hard drive itself experienced some kind of failure.

Using a tablet for a few years… still can’t tap out a complete sentence.

Been using a keyboard [and mouse] for decades, I may figure it out someday

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