Trying to find a way to format the hard drive

Support had a look at my Tablo, told me

but unfortunately we were won’t able to recover the data from the point *after the Tablo reverted itself to a previous state.

It is now stable and no longer at risk of further data loss - but the schedules and recordings available are from 2017-2018. Please let me know if you have any questions. We have disabled remote access to your unit.

Unfortunately, it seems we are not in full agreement on a few terms such as “recovered”, “stable” , and “not at risk of further data loss” , since the shows on the Tablo mostly yield player errors when I try to watch them.

I decided to take matters in my own hands and started the laborious process of manually deleting all the recorded data.

Eventually managed that. However, Tablo still thinks that the drive is approximately 50% utilized:

This has not changed over several hours, so it doesn’t seem as if it is just a delayed clean-up that Tablo has to perform.

Is there a way that I can get Tablo to format the hard drive? there’s nothing on it right now, apart from the channels I selected, the guide data and the few recording schedules.

If you have a Windows PC then connect your drive to the Windows PC and open “Disk Management” and remove any volumes/partitions on the drive you want to use with your Tablo. Do not add any new volume/partitions or format the drive. Be very careful not to remove any volumes/partitions you use on your PC. The format option should be available when you reconnect the drive to your Tablo. The process may be similar on Linux or Mac.

Ah, so I can’t do this directly off Tablo. Thanks.

Not directly from the tablo short of a factory reset - generally not recommended.

Only recorded show are stored on the drive. Guide data and schedule are stored internally on the tablo. This might get cleaned up during maintenance mode. Chances are, even if you format the drive, the until the schedule and recordings DB gets cleared, it’ll still show Recordings on the drive (not sure if it shows allocated space).

As noted, you don’t have to have a Windows system. You can just reformat the partition and tablo won’t see it as authorized anymore and will want to format it.
Actually I think deleting the .dot files and all directories probably will be enough, but not absolutely clear. ( I have a drive I’ve recently removed from a tablo, I should try for future reference)