My Tablo has begun to reboot itself frequently (i.e. several times an hour while watching live TV) and loses its connection with the hard drive intermittently. I’m wondering if it could be a problem with the hard drive that may be causing this? Is there a way to do a fresh reformat manually with the hard drive? There aren’t any programs recorded that I haven’t watched so I don’t care about losing recordings.
Set up specifics: Tablo 2 hardwired to router, Western Digital 1TB Elements USB 3 hard drive, interface to TV’s through Roku 3. Using the Tablo Preview app on the Roku’s.
You can hold in the reset button for like 15 seconds and it will do a (factory?) reset. But I think you WILL lose all your data.
What is the model number of the WD drive you have?
You should upgrade the firmware on your drive before factory resetting the Tablo. Use the WD utility to force an update.
There were no firmware updates available for the hard drive. I’m reformatting now and hoping that is what was causing the hiccup.
You can force an update of the firmware, basically it will re-install the same version and this has helped many with HD problems. Specifically those with the WD Elements drives.
After reformatting the WD Elements drive I was still experiencing quite a few disconnects which was causing instability with the Tablo even in LiveTV mode. I have a 7200rpm 1TB Mercury On-The-Go portable USB 3 drive from Other World Computing (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MSU37T1.0T16/) on hand that I use for work and decided to try it out. So far (3 days) it’s been far more stable than the WD drive. No problems with error messages during LiveTV and no problems with several test recordings I’ve made. I’ll keep testing and also plan to do the suggested forced firmware update on the WD drive to see if that solves the issue there, but at least I know I’ve got a solution that is working for now.