Homebrew Homebrew channel suddenly stopped loading anything and DSI Errors when I try.

[BriansCar]

This thing has been working for years, never any problems. First I noticed games werent loading in GX Loader, then a couple of weeks later GX Loader stopped even loading itself. Now I went in and tried to go into the Homebrew channel, nothing showed up. Went to the menu and selected SD Card, core dump crash DSI error. Went back in again, tried USB as a source, everything fell apart again.

What gives? Did the Wii just decide to corrupt itself slowly over time when it was sitting lonely unused on a shelf?

The Wii itself still works fine, games play off real discs and luckily I happened to load the Neogamma loader some time ago onto a channel and that one works fine as well with whatever I try to load off the USB stick, so technically I can still do everything I want to do, and I really have no need to fix anything, but it is really bugging me that I have no idea what went wrong.

So how would I start going about fixing this?

Wii was modded some time ago, pretty sure its 4.3 on there, I used the Letterbomb method. The bootloader thing is the white one that starts with a P.

Maybe the SD Card went bad? That's all I can think of to start, but right now I have no spares to try or a way to hook it up to my PC to see if its still readable.

 

[endoverend]

I'm almost positive your SD card is the issue. To test it out, try using a new SD card or put an app or two in the "apps" folder on the root of your USB. See if those apps will load when you select USB in the HBC options. Make sure to have the SD card ejected when you do this.

 

[BriansCar]

I'm almost positive your SD card is the issue. To test it out, try using a new SD card or put an app or two in the "apps" folder on the root of your USB. See if those apps will load when you select USB in the HBC options. Make sure to have the SD card ejected when you do this.

The USB is formatted in that funky Wii format where I had to use one of those Wii load your stuff onto the USB stick programs in Windows, so Windows itself doesn't recognize it as a properly formatted USB stick.

Is there something I can use to load apps onto it like you mention? I dont even remember what I used to load stuff on it way back when. I dont even have that same PC that I used anymore.

 

[endoverend]

The USB is formatted in that funky Wii format where I had to use one of those Wii load your stuff onto the USB stick programs in Windows, so Windows itself doesn't recognize it as a properly formatted USB stick.

Is there something I can use to load apps onto it like you mention? I dont even remember what I used to load stuff on it way back when. I dont even have that same PC that I used anymore.

If you're talking about WBFS, that USB format is horribly outdated and should never be used any more. Consider formatting the USB hard drive as FAT32 instead, and just putting your ISO's in a "games" folder on the root of the HDD. If you don't want to format it, there's no way to add homebrew apps to it. You'll need another USB stick.

 

[BriansCar]

Can I pull the images off of it back onto my pc and move them back over if its fat32?

 

[endoverend]

Can I pull the images off of it back onto my pc and move them back over if its fat32?

Of course, in fact it's much easier to do on FAT32. Windows recognizes it as just a normal USB stick.

 

[BriansCar]

Okay final question, maybe, why did I have to do WBFS back in the day and (this is now two questions) do I need to do anything different on the Wii to get the FAT32 stick recognized? I know Windows can do FAT fine, but there must have been a reason I couldn't just use a standard format when I originally did all of this.

 

[endoverend]

WBFS is basically the native file format of the Wii. Using the WBFS format you were able to trim game to nearly half their size. Originally, there were no developments on getting the Wii to recognize a standard filesystem, so it was easiest to just build a new filesystem and to write cIOS that recognize it natively. The development of recognizing FAT32 didn't come until around 2010-2011.

For the Wii, you may have to use a different USB loader. If you're not using it already, then install USB loader (shown here), or if you are using it, make sure you have the latest version from the link I just mentioned.

 

[BriansCar]

Oh well that's interesting.

So this does bring about one new question. The files on the USB stick have an extension of .wbfs (I am extracting them now so I see this).

If I format to fat32 and move them back, will a .wbfs file work on the new loader on a fat32 filesystem? I am using Wii Backup Manager to do all this. Or will it all just take care of itself once it's formatted and moved back over?

 

[endoverend]

Oh well that's interesting.

So this does bring about one new question. The files on the USB stick have an extension of .wbfs (I am extracting them now so I see this).

If I format to fat32 and move them back, will a .wbfs file work on the new loader on a fat32 filesystem? I am using Wii Backup Manager to do all this. Or will it all just take care of itself once it's formatted and moved back over?

You can use Wii Backup Manager to move the wbfs files back over to the HDD if you want. They should go into a "wbfs" folder on the root of the hard drive, then in a folder for the individual games. Wii Backup Manager will take care of the naming of the folders for you, and USB Loader GX will recognize the wbfs files natively. WBFS is still the best file format for the Wii, but formatting a hard drive as WBFS just makes everything harder.

 

[tswntk]

simply use wbfs2fat to convert WBFS partition to FAT32 in seconds. Of couse, backing up first is never a bad idea

 

[BriansCar]

You were right about it being the SD Card. To give you an idea of how old it is, it's a 64 megabyte (not GB) card.

I formatted the USB stick to Fat32, transferred the games back, put on the new version of USB Loader, and hey, everything worked fine from the Homebrew Channel. I then added on iieModLite, booted that up, and installed the USB Loader as a channel. Now everything is right back to how it was.

Thanks. Mystery solved. SD Card served me well, I should give it a proper burial.