Hacking Homebrew New drive in same enclosure will not play games.

donka

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Hoping someone can help me here. Got a 320GB WD external hard drive I have been using successfully for years via USBLoaderGX. Recently, it has been making a clicking sound so figured it was time to change. Got a Crucial Sata SSD drive and formatted this as WBFS using WBFS Manager and copied the games from the old to the new drive directly using WBFS Manager. Put the new drive in the old enclosure. The issue with this new drive is that all the games show up on the Wii in USBLoader and I can click on any to pull up the game screen but as soon as I click on the icon to start the game, I get a black screen and the Wii remote disconnects. I need to power cycle the Wii to recover. If I swap back to the old WD drive in the same enclosure, the games play fine. This is the same for any game. Any idea why this is? I didn’t think the drive itself could be a factor if I used the same enclosure. Thanks in advance for any help.
 

morning_glory

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Try & format SSD to Fat32. You did state a WBFS format (not file standard).
I only use WBFS partitions on SD's with USB adapters, & they work perfectly.

The clicking noise is a downer. You HDD is going to crap itself, soon. Just a matter of time. Or, the power transmission is failing.
Could also indicate that your clicking HDD may have damaged files already or failed during transfer.

I just don't get why SSD's are called drives. My memory must be bad ;)

I never used SSD & not sure if sleep modes are applicable, but do look into it.
 

donka

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Thanks. I've tried with the drive formatted as FAT32. Exact same behaviour unfortunately. I'm going to try an updated cIOS install next as It's been years since it was installed.
 

CoolMe

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Put the new drive in the old enclosure. The issue with this new drive is that all the games show up on the Wii in USBLoader and I can click on any to pull up the game screen but as soon as I click on the icon to start the game, I get a black screen and the Wii remote disconnects. I need to power cycle the Wii to recover. If I swap back to the old WD drive in the same enclosure, the games play fine. This is the same for any game. Any idea why this is? I didn’t think the drive itself could be a factor if I used the same enclosure. Thanks in advance for any help.
Hmm.. I suggest formatting it as FAT32 32kb clusters. Check that ssd has only one partition, and is set to MBR (not GPT), if not, change it.
After that copy only one game (just for the sake of testing) with WiiBackupManager, and check it for corruption (by verifying the hash).
Plug it back, make sure it's plugged in port 0 (lowest port when the Wii is sitting horizontally). And if you have a y usb cable use it, if not, it's probably fine. And try again with usbloadergx.
You could post a syscheck to look at your softmods, but since your old hdd was working just fine, don't think you're missing any crucial cIOSes, still post it if you want (to update them atleast).
 

donka

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Turns out I needed to update USBLoader GX and cIOS to latest. Now working fine. Strange that the old drive continued to work fine but the new drive didn't in the same enclosure.
Of course, I also tested out running games from SD card as well and that worked fine too so might just go for a larger SD card and skip the USB drive altogether if there are no performance concerns?

Thanks for your replies.
 

CoolMe

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Turns out I needed to update USBLoader GX and cIOS to latest.
Was going to suggest that too but didn't think it's the one preventing it from working.
I also tested out running games from SD card as well and that worked fine too so might just go for a larger SD card and skip the USB drive altogether if there are no performance concerns?
Well not all Wii games will work from the sd card with no issues, but it's getting better..
 

donka

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Well not all Wii games will work from the sd card with no issues, but it's getting better..
Thanks for the warning. Is there a compatibility list anywhere or do you know of some of the more premium games that are affected?
 

CoolMe

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Is there a compatibility list anywhere or do you know of some of the more premium games that are affected?
It's just trial and error, no compatibility list. I personally use an ext hdd, so i don't care for that really. Also to preserve the sd reader, from failing/ dying from too much wear & tear, but to each their own i guess.
 
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