Hacking Is it possible to revert WiiU-formatted HDD to a regular, say, FAT32 HDD?

[stargoonman]

Hey guys,

I'm new to WiiU scene here.

I heard that a developer found a way to allow one HDD to host WiiU, Wii and GC games two months ago. According to my research, there hasn't been no news yet so it's just an upcoming feature he's working on.

My week long vacation is coming from work and I'm thinking of purchasing an WiiU soon.

I've done a quite a bit of research, but I couldn't find a clear answer on this:

Is it possible to reformat a WiiU formatted HDD to a FAT32 HDD?
I'm asking because once the new feature comes out for Mocha, I'd like to put Wii and GC backups as well, without needing to own a large SD card, or a secondary HDD.

Also, would it be possible to transfer my saves (from the WiiU formatted HDD for the Brazilian USB) once the FAT32 support arrives?

Thanks!

 

[Natsuru]

Yes it is possable to format the disk as fat32 or any file system supported by your pc or mac.
Disk Management in windows
Disk utility in OSX.
Not sure what "Brazilian USB" is.

 

[stargoonman]

I meant, to use the Brazilian USB method, I heard you need to format your HDD to a dedicated WiiU format.

I was wondering if I could rever that formatted HDD so once the FAT32 support comes I can reformat it to repurpose it as a WiiU, Wii and GC backup loader/storage.

 

[Kafluke]

Hey guys,

I'm new to WiiU scene here.

I heard that a developer found a way to allow one HDD to host WiiU, Wii and GC games two months ago. According to my research, there hasn't been no news yet so it's just an upcoming feature he's working on.

My week long vacation is coming from work and I'm thinking of purchasing an WiiU soon.

I've done a quite a bit of research, but I couldn't find a clear answer on this:

Is it possible to reformat a WiiU formatted HDD to a FAT32 HDD?
I'm asking because once the new feature comes out for Mocha, I'd like to put Wii and GC backups as well, without needing to own a large SD card, or a secondary HDD.

Also, would it be possible to transfer my saves (from the WiiU formatted HDD for the Brazilian USB) once the FAT32 support arrives?

Thanks!

FAT32 USB support only works with Loadiine. So you still have all the Loadiine limitations this way.

 

[stargoonman]

FAT32 USB support only works with Loadiine. So you still have all the Loadiine limitations this way.

Really? I must have been misinformed.

Although not out yet, I heard Mocha FAT32 USB support would be similar to being recognized as a genuine USB HDD?

 

[nexusmtz]

Although not out yet, I heard Mocha FAT32 USB support would be similar to being recognized as a genuine USB HDD?

Yes, the system will see it as a drive under the test release of Mocha, but FAT32 doesn't support all of the system's features, so it currently doesn't work as an install source or destination.

You can copy the installed files over to the FAT32 drive and use that drive as your USB drive, but since the WiiU's own FAT implementation is inefficient, you will get performance that's around the speed of Loadiine.

 

[Taleweaver]

Ow...I see a couple wrong assumptions here. :\

@SirECK: he's basically saying he has a USB drive filled with games (and savegames for it) in nintendo's proprietary format. He's asking whether it'll be possible to keep what's on the disk while changing the partition table from <whatever it's called> to FAT32.

To be honest: I have serious doubts that'll ever be possible directly. After all, the entire structure of how the bits and bytes are organised are determined by it (you can't change FAT32 to NTFS or other partition forms without losing data either). So the best to hope for is a homebrew app that copies all from your wiiu formatted USB drive to a secondary FAT32 one, or a PC program that'll let you copy all on the disk to your hard drive (and from there to a FAT32 one).

@stargoonman : Kafluke's right, but that doesn't mean you are wrong or misinformed (that latter may be the case, but you may also have drawn a wrong assumption). You see, there is this mod for mocha that redirects all calls from SD to USB. So when using it, you can use a FAT32 formatted drive as a sort of SD card of a couple terabytes. As such, you can run loadiine from USB, and games from USB as well. There's a drawback to this, though: dimok (mocha's creator) originally assumed that this switching from SD card to USB would solve slowdowns that the SD card has. However, this turned out not to be because of the hardware restrictions but because nintendo hadn't properly written code for decently running things from "SD" -> the same slowdowns happen on USB as well. Support has dwindled down since then (to my knowledge, the mod never even made it in a full release of mocha yet). But because there was some hype for it some months back, I can believe that some breadcrumbs got spread into the internet and ended up in you believing this'll be an upcoming feature.

 

[AmandaRose]

If you go the mocha Fat32 route with Loadiine you are going to be stuck with horrible loading times for some games like Mario 3d world takes minutes to load to the title screen then each level takes about 20 seconds to load. Zelda breath of the wild even longer so it's best to stick to the Brazilian method

 

[stargoonman]

Wow, thanks guys!

It's a shame Nintendo wrote a terrible driver for SD.

 

[nexusmtz]

It's a shame Nintendo wrote a terrible driver for SD.

Maybe someone at Nintendo tried to get us something better
"Hey, we've got this SD card for Wii compatibility. Can we do something with it on the WiiU side?"

"Sure. How about letting them save Mii pictures on a FAT file system so they can see them on the computer?"​

"Yeah, something like that. Just so it doesn't seem like wasted hardware."

"Ok, I'll add that after lunch"​

"Nice. And tomorrow, could you make it capable of quickly loading thousands of different files, and licensing ExFAT would be awesome."

"Wait. What?"​