A few weeks ago, my TabloTV, which I use to record over-the-air TV, started making strange noises. I could hear the hard drive seeking constantly and a separate chirping sound. Eventually, it failed completely. The UI showed a “No Storage” error, and I couldn’t watch any of my recordings.
Here’s how I diagnosed and fixed the problems.
Problem 1: The “No Storage” Error
My first goal was to get my recordings back. TabloTV’s support suggested I replace the hard drive, but I wanted to see if I could repair it first. I learned from the TabloTV forums that the device uses the ext4 filesystem, and that other people had been able to fix this issue by attaching their TabloTV’s drive to a Linux PC and using the fsck command to repair the filesystem.
I don’t have a general-purpose Linux PC at home. But I do have a Mac. I used UTM to run an Ubuntu Server virtual machine on my Mac. I enabled USB sharing in UTM, which let the VM see the TabloTV’s hard drive when I plugged it in.
Inside the VM, the drive appeared as /dev/sdb. I ran fsck to repair it:
sudo fsck /dev/sdb1
I put the drive back into the TabloTV, and it worked. The “No Storage” error was gone, and my recordings were accessible again. However, the drive was still making constant seeking noises.
Problem 2: Replacing the Hard Drive
It wasn’t clear whether the drive was failing or not. It seemed fine when accessed from the Linux VM. To rule out the possibility of a failing drive, I decided to replace the old 2TB spinning drive with a new 2TB SSD. To save my recordings, I needed to clone the old drive to the new one.
I first tried using rsync inside my Ubuntu VM to copy the files, but it was too slow, running at only 2.5 MB/s.
A full disk clone is much faster. I switched to a tool called ddrescue. To get the best performance, I installed ddrescue with Homebrew and ran it directly on my Mac, avoiding the VM overhead.
I used diskutil list to find the drive names. For my setup, the old drive was disk20 and the new SSD was disk21. I ran this command to clone the drive:
sudo ddrescue -f -v -c 262144 /dev/rdisk20 /dev/rdisk21 ddrescue.logfile
The cloning process took 36 hours. To prevent the Mac from sleeping, I used the caffeinate -is command. The whole disk copy completed with no errors. I installed the new SSD in the TabloTV. The seeking noises were gone, and the TabloTV’s UI felt faster.
Problem 3: The Chirping Noise
Even with the new, silent SSD, the TabloTV unit itself still made a high-pitched chirping sound.
I went back to the forums and found that a faulty power adapter can cause this. The original adapter was a 12V 2A model. I found a spare power adapter with the same specs from an old cable modem and swapped it in.
That fixed it. The chirping noise was gone.
Conclusion
My TabloTV had two problems: a corrupted filesystem and a bad power adapter. I fixed the filesystem with fsck and the noise by swapping the power adapter. I probably didn’t need to replace the hard drive, but the new SSD made the TabloTV silent and faster.