Hacking Having problems with USB and homebrew

[solarsaturn9]

Hi there.

I have been having problems with certain homebrew recognizing my hard drive. Let me preface this with the following:

1) I have a Western Digital 1Tb Mybook
2) USB Loader GX works perfectly (minus some shady emunand stuff not functioning correctly)
3) My homebrew is stored on an SD card
4) My backups and roms are stored on my WD 1Tb USB drive
5) SaveGame Manager GX can browse my WD 1Tb USB drive just fine

So here's the problem: emulator homebrew, such as Snes9x GX, FCE Ultra GX, and Genesis Plus Gx, cannot see my USB drive. I have tried to using the other USB port in the back of the console with no luck.

Has anyone else had this problem? What should I do? I would really like to use my USB drive for all of my retro backups because I don't want to have to buy a large SD card to do this.

 

[snarkyerica]

Your drive must be formatted as FAT32.

 

[solarsaturn9]

It is.

 

[darkseekerliu]

Hi there.

I have been having problems with certain homebrew recognizing my hard drive. Let me preface this with the following:

1) I have a Western Digital 1Tb Mybook
2) USB Loader GX works perfectly (minus some shady emunand stuff not functioning correctly)
3) My homebrew is stored on an SD card
4) My backups and roms are stored on my WD 1Tb USB drive
5) SaveGame Manager GX can browse my WD 1Tb USB drive just fine

So here's the problem: emulator homebrew, such as Snes9x GX, FCE Ultra GX, and Genesis Plus Gx, cannot see my USB drive. I have tried to using the other USB port in the back of the console with no luck.

Has anyone else had this problem? What should I do? I would really like to use my USB drive for all of my retro backups because I don't want to have to buy a large SD card to do this.

As Apollo justice suggested, format your hard drive as fat32 with 32kb cluster size and set it as first and active. Use Easus partition (http://www.partition-tool.com/) manager to do this.

 

[solarsaturn9]

It is formatted to FAT but I'm not sure the cluster size is right. Is there a Mac partition utility that I could use? I don't have a PC.

 

[darkseekerliu]

It is formatted to FAT but I'm not sure the cluster size is right. Is there a Mac partition utility that I could use? I don't have a PC.

After googling a bit I found this one that seems to work on mac - http://gparted.org/

 

[solarsaturn9]

After a LONG two days of trying to fix this problem, here was the solution:

I ended up using my new PC that I just built to look at the partitions because Mac has next to NO solutions for advanced partition management and Gparted live CD would not launch on either my Mac or my PC upon boot. First off, there was a blank 50Gb partition at the beginning of the hard drive. I tried to change the size of the main Wii backup partition using Easeus Partition Manager. For those of you who have never done this before and are trying to expand a FAT32 partition to the full size of the drive, this will not work. You need some empty space at the end of the drive for the process to work in a timely manner. I am not sure why this is but my best guess is it acts as a place to cache the data you're trying to relocate on the drive. Ultimately, I couldn't feasibly expand the partition to the size of the entire drive so I copied ALL of the data from the external drive to a spare internal drive on my PC. I then reformatted my external drive and discovered a few other gotchas. Wii homebrew, such as the emulators, will only find your external hard drive if the drive is MBR formatted, as opposed to GPT, and if the partition with the backups / roms is set as "primary." I couldn't find these options easily in Easeus Partition Manager so I ended up using Mini Tool Partition Wizard Home Edition, which is another partition management freeware program.

So now I FINALLY have a 2Tb hard drive with one partition taking up the entire drive that I can easily use for backups. Now my only concern is recompiling the various emulators to worth with UStealth so the Wii U stops nagging me about my external drive.