So, as of version 4.436 is USB HDD functionality still known to be problematic? I set this up the other day and was racking my brain and searching the web for hours and hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get things to work with a USB HDD (btw games load fine from my SD card). I eventually found a few posts that discussed something to do with USB HDD properties being changed as of v2.230. The OP mentions I should try v2.229, but no link was provided, and I can't find a copy online.
Some background: I've tried 3 different USB drives... a 750GB Seagate Momentus, a 320GB Hitachi, and a 128GB Lexar USB flash drive. All 3 drives were formatted to FAT32 with 32k clusters and were each set up with one primary & active partition. The two HDDs were put into a Velocity (Memory Express brand) USB 3.0 external enclosure and connected to the bottom / outer-most USB port on the Wii. The enclosure and the drives work just fine for loading Wii games via USB Loader GX, so I don't think there is any problem with the enclosure or HDD partitions themselves.
However, when it comes to GameCube games, it's a different story. Nintendont sees the HDDs and the games stored on them just fine. (And yes, the games have been placed under the proper folders and all named to 'game.iso'.) However, when I try to open a game, the screen goes black and the hard drive light starts to blink like crazy as if it's accessing files. I've left this for 20+ minutes but the screen remains black and the HDD continues to be constantly accessed. As I mentioned above, these problems don't occur on my SD card, and everything is set up exactly the same way on the SD.
It's a bit of a different story for the Lexar USB flash drive; if I have 15 games or less loaded on the drive, then everything works fine. However, if I load 16 or more games onto it, then problems occur. First, Nintendont (and other apps) no longer show up in the Homebrew Channel. If I take the drive back to my PC and run a checkdisk on it, then all of a sudden the apps show up again. However, when I try to load one of the newly-added games in Nintendont, it hangs when trying to create the virtual memory card for the new game (I've tried 59 and 251 memory card sizes to no avail). I've re-formatted the drive a couple of times and even ran a surface scan which came back 100% healthy. Maybe Nintendont can't handle USB flash drives that are as large as 128GB?
Any help would be appreciated. I will happily provide more details upon request.
Cheers,
Visor