Hacking Borked HDD after WBFS formating

[Red Ire Lap]

Well, i've run into a seemingly unique problem as i cant seem to find the solution anywhere on the web (possibly because it pertains to WBFS formatting). Anyways, long story short, i decided that i wanted to play some Wii games through USB, so i formatted 100GB of my 1TB HDD (WD My Book 1130 with USB3). Lo and behold after this feet was accomplished, the entire drive is unrecognizable for the most part (neither the NTFS or the WBFS partition is visible in my computer) or when it is recognized it shows as something ridiculous like 2.3 million GB in size (therefore rendering format times upwards of 600000 hours, or roughly 70 years). I used WBFS Manager 3 to format the partition. Please, I dont care if i have to format if possible. Let me know my options (other than using it in brick related activities

) Thanks.

 

[ddetkowski]

1st off, WBFS formatting is long dead!
Reason: Quirky, unstable HDD partition. I know, it crapped out on one of my drives back in the day...
Fix: Format your ENTIRE drive to FAT32, using FAT32 GUI formatter. google it.
Next, use Wii Backup Manager to transfer your wii games to your usb drive. Transfer a game and it will automatically create a WBFS FOLDER onto your drive, and will put the games in said folder for you, and, don't worry, any game over 4GB will be automatically split in said folder, making ALL games valid and playable. ( I've got over 200 games on my drives....)
Next, install a USB loader onto your wii, I use Configurable USB loader, works great, and is the most stable / reliable loader out there.
Also, you may want to use Modmii to update your hacked wii, is the most user-friendly windows app for updating your wii. link for that is in my sig.....

 

[obcd]

What you will need is a reinstallation of the master boot record of the harddisk. It describes the 4 primary partitions on the harddisk and their size. When that is fixed, you will be able to reformat the partitions in a normal amount of time.

Are you sure your harddisk is compatible with the wii? (Did you check it out on the internet?) usb3.0 compatible drives have a bad reputation for the moment.

 

[Red Ire Lap]

Thanks for the info, ill google and try the GUi Formatter, if all else fails. Where would i find said master boot record for my HDD? I didnt even get to plug it into my wii, to test out the USB3 functionality. Anywho I'll update tomorrow on my situation when i have time. I believe the problem with the WBFS on the My Book, was that there is some sort of firmwear installed on the drive which i thought i deleted and it seems to be conflicting with the partition. Anyways, thanks again, ill let you know how this puzzle goes.

 

[shortz1994]

have you tried to go into disk management? write all 0(zero's). to the hard drive. yes this will erase all partitions. but will be able to format it to fat32. an it will take care of all the extra crap WD puts on the drives.(this is how i solved my issue). but mine is the model right before 3.0 came out, but is 3.0 compatible. xflak also put a fat 32 formatter in modmii, this is what i used to format mine.

 

[Red Ire Lap]

Okay well, i said i would be getting to this on August 26th but Xenoblade got the best of me. I have rekindled my intrest in fixing this problem. The Gui Formatter cannot detect the HDD and trying to write all zeros on the drive was attempted and still reads as taking years to complete. This was on an early attempt back when the drive was detected by a WD formatter (however now it no longer gets detected).

Edit - It's not detected in 'My Computer' as a storage device, it is detected in 'Devices and Printers' as needing troubleshooting.

 

[XFlak]

Try disk management like shortz said, then just delete the partition, then create a new simple partition, fat32 won't be an option, so just choose ntfs, then launch fat32 gui formatter and make it fat32

if windows disk management doesn't work for u, there are lots of free 3rd party alternatives available online

 

[Red Ire Lap]

Okay, I've made some progress with disk management, however only about 14gigs of my 1 TB drive are accessible for some reason. I've formatted that to NTFS and is now detectable by other formatting software. The other 134 217 727 .92 gigs (literally listed that way) are listed as 'Not Initialized'. When i try and initialize it in disk management, it gives me an error stating "The device is not ready". Do i need to give it a back rub or something to get it going?

 

[Taleweaver]

It's a bit of a shot in the dark, but you could try using EASUS partition manager. Full details on this page. (I know it's a first step for getting sneek to work, but it'll also work for traditional softmodding).

 

[XFlak]

gparted is another very powerful tool, but it doesn't run on windows so u'll either need to run it off a live cd or off a linux OS. If all the other alternatives that work on windows don't work for you, you should consider this. I've personally used it to fix a usb flash drive that wasn't even recognized by windows.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

 

[Sicklyboy]

You could also create DBAN bootable media. Not a partition manager like EASUS or gparted, but it can delete partitions for zero-fill drives outside of a Windows environment. This is my personal preference for drive erasing.

http://www.dban.org/download

 

[Wiimm]

1st off, WBFS formatting is long dead!
Reason: Quirky, unstable HDD partition. I know, it crapped out on one of my drives back in the day...

This is a very personnel meaning. There are enough users (and I'm one of them) who use WBFS Partitions without any problems and without fragmentation issues. Handling is very fast and if you use the right tools and scripts. I have not one problem with WBFS since the last >20 month.

 

[crazycaveman]

It could also be related to your operating system. If you're on XP and have not installed SP2 or 3, that should be your first step.