Wow Man, I was going to ask that, thanks for giving your solution !to answer my own question - DiscU is buggy and can't handle certain .wud files.
the generic iso extractor of vgmtoolbox can be used to extract those images - WII U images require 'ckey.bin' in the vgmtoolbox\external\wiiu directory, and 'disckey.bin' in the same directory as the source .wud image file.