Got an update regarding an earlier discovery I made regarding copying partitions via Gparted.
It turns out that you can do the following process to make a backup of your verification files that should work on
any USB drive regardless of size, though obviously it'll still only work on your own Wii system. This is mainly for people that have Wii systems with dead disc drives and therefore cannot re-verify their games without access to a second Wii.
- Backup any data from your Wii's USB drive that you want to keep.
- Manually delete (not format!) everything on your Wii's USB drive except USB:\\Apps\gc_devo
- (optional). Delete everything in USB:\\Apps\gc_devo except any and all files ending with the file extension .DVV (they're hidden by default in Windows).
- Use a program like Gparted to resize the FAT32 partition that contains the .DVV files to 257 MB.
- Use a program like CloneZilla to clone or backup the newly-resized 257 MB partition (only the partition, not the entire disk!) to an image file or similar.
- Store the newly-created image file of your partition backup in a safe place.
Now in the future when you want to use a different USB drive just to the following:
- Find your image file containing your backed-up FAT32 partition.
- Using the program you used above in step 5, restore the image file to your new USB drive.
- Resize the newly-restored FAT32 partition to your desired size, such as the full size the new USB drive.
- Recopy your GameCube games and Wii homebrew into the newly-restored FAT32 partition.
- Plug your new USB drive into your Wii and enjoy your GameCube games without needing to re-verify.
I have not tested it yet, but you may even be able to restore the partition image of a USB drive onto an SD card without needing to reverify any GC games; this would be particularly useful for Wii U owners since Devolution does not currently support hidden partitions.