Hardware Both USB ports identified as USB2://

[comokepa]

I had a 2.5" HD drive connected to the outer USB port and apps identified it as being connected to the USB1:// port.

The drive was flacky so I replaced it with a 3.5" one in a powered enclosure, but no matter what USB port of the Wii I connect this HDD to, the Wii identifies it as being connected to USB2://

Is it normal? Does not having the HDD drive identified as USB1:// have any drawback/incompatibility with any homebrew app?

 

[LinkFan16]

Are there maybe multiple partitions on your HDD? If so, the usb port it is connected to will not matter. Instead, if there are for example two partitions present on the HDD, one of them should be identified as usb1:\ and the other as usb2:\

 

[comokepa]

Are there maybe multiple partitions on your HDD?

A single partition with a GUID Partition Table (GPT). The enclosure does have an additional eSATA port but no additional (visible) USB ports besides the one I am plugging it to.

 

[Cyan]

the ports are not numbered or displayed in any homebrew.
Homebrew are displaying the partitions number for the selected (or merged) connected HDD.

partitions can be span over different HDD. (not your current situation, just an example when using two drives at the same time)
Port0 partition 1 : USB1:/
port1 partition 1 : USB2:/
port1 partition 2 : USB3:/


Maybe your HDD has a hidden partition you don't see on your computer's OS. the console doesn't care about OS's hidden partition and assign a number to all of them. (up to 8 partitions can be mounted).

it could cause a problem if you are using DIOS MIOS (which always use the first partition), but it's not compatible with GPT.
If the loader detects your first partition as USB2, it means the first (hidden) partition is not a known and compatible format, so all homebrew should skip it.
you shouldn't have any issue with your partition being mounted as USB2:/ in any other homebrew.
Nintendont is mounting the first primary FAT32, or the first GPT FAT32 (or exFAT now).
other homebrew should let you select the partition to use.

 

[comokepa]

the ports are not numbered or displayed in any homebrew.
Homebrew are displaying the partitions number for the selected (or merged) connected HDD.

Maybe your HDD has a hidden partition you don't see on your computer's OS.

I see. WiiXplorer does indeed let me access an (empty) USB1 partition. I have not tried writing to it.

I formatted the 1TB HDD with OS X’ Disk Utility selecting GUID Partition Table as the partition table format and FAT32 as the File System format, which seemed to format it with 32KB clusters without any further tinkering.

Nintendont is mounting the first primary FAT32, or the first GPT FAT32 (or exFAT now).

Nintendont exits on start reporting "No usb:/games dir found" :-/

 

[Cyan]

maybe it's seeing the hidden partition as usable.
You could check the partition list and format in a partition tool.

 

[comokepa]

The disk does indeed have two partitions, apparently, even though Disk Utility only reveals one. Mac OS X’ Disk Utility seemingly includes a hidden EFI partition as the first one whenever formatting an HDD with GPT. More details on this and how to get rid of that partition here (haven't tried yet).

Thanks for leading me to the answer.

Update: Did not work (T_T). Following the tutorial linked above, I could successfully remove the hidden first EFI partition. Running `diskutil list` now returns:

/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:       Microsoft Basic Data WIIHD                   1000.0 GB  disk1s2

(note, though, that while `/dev/disk1s1` is gone, the FAT32 partition where I store data for the Wii remains as `/dev/disk1s2`)

Nintendont still reports “No FAT device found, or missing usb:/games dir!” when selecting “USB” on start. Note that I run Nintendont from the very same HDD where the `games` dir also resides, which Nintendont seemingly cannot see. Selecting “SD” on start (and making sure a `games` dir does exist too in the inserted SD Card) does not cause the error.

Might it be that, even though now only one partition exists for sure, it being disk1s2 instead of disk1s1 causes some incompatibility?

Update 2: I guess it is better to take this question to Nintendont's thread. If I get an answer there, I will update this thread.

 

[Cyan]

is your partition #0 the hidden one?
because it's 1TB size, it's quite big for a hidden one. I wonder which data it needs to put on it to make one hidden this big.
edit: Oh, I guess it's only a container (which is more probable as it matches the same size than the partition)

I don't know MAC OSX at all, but I guess if you deleted disk1s1 and it's mark as unformated, it should now work with nintendont. Or maybe it's a bug in nintendont which doesn't correctly detect FAT32 format from the available GPT partitions. GPT support is quite new, so there still could be incompatibility and stability issues.

 

[comokepa]

I guess if you deleted disk1s1 and it's mark as unformated, it should now work with nintendont.

No, it does not work on Nintendont v3.401 (which actually was recently fixed to ignore the hidden EFI partition that OS X creates when formatting HDDs with GPT, but I only found that after manually removing it: I guess simply updating should have been my 1st option).

Interestingly, the HDD does work with some of Nintendont's older versions (up to 3.353 at least). I have reported this in Nintendont’s thread and am awaiting an answer.

 

[comokepa]

Issue identified & fixed.

 

[spacelaser]

You should let your usb ports identify as whatever they want.

 

[Cyan]

Issue identified & fixed.

Thank you for reporting it (I don't follow nintendont thread).
If it's an issue with nintendont, maybe it is with USBLoaderGX too ? (I'll have to verify if there's a check to skip empty GPT partition).
Edit: there's already a check in place.