Hacking 3TB, 4TB, 5TB, or 6TB+ drives with vWii, USB Loader GX, Nintendont

[ca032769]

so if i get a 8tb usb HDD that one how do i setup it up and this is for the wii u + its vwii
how does this work is it sectioned off in different parts IDK NOOBIE but wants a set up
MAX IT OUT MAN
and this will work with the OG wii ?
and how is it does it work with every thing ?

I think lordelan has pretty much covered it in the above post. I'm also new to the Wii U, my 8TB drive setup is being used on the original Wii. I've just recently used the Wii U eshop Helper to get those titles and will be setting up my Wii U soon.

@lordelan, that's great information above. I had originally wanted to use a huge drive for Wii U, but after it was explained that the Wii U would format the drive to its proprietary format I decided I'll just use a smaller drive. Good to know about the vWii drive usage in your steps above.

 

[brollikk]

took me quite a few days to get it all right. but basically:

Wii U requires it's own hard drive no matter what and wii/gc require its own hard drive no matter what.
Wii U has a hard 2tb limit no matter what - so to best utilize it - I'd get a 3 or 4 tb hard drive (powered) depending on what's cheaper.
Wii/Gc/wiiware FULL collection is less than 5tb so I would get a 5 or 6 TB hard drive (WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK IS THE BEST FOR THIS ONE).

Use the WD quick formatter tool in xp compatability mode to turn your mybook into MBR format and then GUI formatter to format it into one huge fat32 partition. After installing all wii games, gc, emunand/sneek, wiiware, turn on ustealth and leave both drives plugged in at all times.

 

[dthbxo]

Don't get confused about that Wii U part.
On the Wii U there's four ways to play games:

1. Install them with WUP Installer GX2 to USB (or nand if you want)
2. Play them from your SD card using the homebrew Loadiine
3. Play them from your FAT32 USB drive with Loadiine using the FAT32 Mocha CFW build
4. Play them from your FAT32 USB drive installed with WUP Installer GX to a none FAT32 place (either NAND or a Wii U formatted USB drive) and move them over to a FAT32 drive using your PC and ftpiiu everywhere, then use FAT32 Mocha CFW build again to use that drive for your Wii U.

The only good solution in my opinion is 1.
You would need an extra drive for that, that is only being used by the Wii U, not the (v)Wii, as it has to be formatted into the Wii U filesystem. Also keep in mind that 2 TB is the absolute max size for that drive. You can use bigger drives but that would be a waste as the Wii U can only use 2 TB and the rest of the space would be unusable.
With method 1 you have full compatibility which means every game runs without any issues and in full speed.
Method 2 was the main method until the WUP method (also known as Brazilian Exploit btw) came up. The problems are obvious: You can't store many games on a SD card, it's slow and due to the way Loadiine works it has some issues (cutscenes in Twilight Princess are buggy) and not every game works (One Peace Unlimited World Red and a few others). You'll have long loading times also.
For method 3 there's a special build of Mocha CFW that supports FAT32 drives so from the moment where you launch that Mocha build, you're Wii U uses an attached FAT32 drive as its SD card. So everything that could be done with a SD card before (including method 2) can be done from USB now. You would however have the same issues as in 2 as it's still Loadiine after all.
Method 4 sounds promising but it's the worst one, really. Don't do that ever.
It's tricky, buggy, takes a long time to set up (ftpiiu is slow) and the biggest downside: You're still limited to 2 TB even on your FAT32 drive. So the big advantage that you could use your FAT32 (v)Wii drive for your Wii U games too turns into a disadvantage as there's only 2 TB in which everything for your Wii U, Wii and GC (Nintendont) has to take place. Also loading times are as slow as in Loadiine due to the shitty Ninty FAT driver.

For the Wii or vWii (both are technically the same when it comes to hard drive usage) you can use any drive size. 5 or even 8 TB are completely fine (although I don't know why you would need 8 TB lol). Just be sure to format it into one big FAT32 partition and use MBR instead of GPT.
If you don't know how to do that formatting magic, write back here and I'll try to help you.
There are however three things you should know when using a drive on the vWii:

1. Using 2,5" drives is only possible with an Y cable as the Wii U doesn't offer enough voltage on the USB ports where the good old Wii did. So a 2,5" drive takes up an extra USB slot (two in sum). You could use an active USB hub though.
2. Some drives go in sleep mode and some apps like USB Loader GX are not able to wake them up properly with standard settings so you need to use a workaround (changing USBLGX's IOS, using another homebrew first which doesn't have that issue like WiiFlow to boot into USBLGX or put USBLGX on the USB drive only and relaunch the forwarder channel for it until it launches)
3. If you attach a FAT32 drive to the Wii U it would complain about it with an annoying popup so you might want to "hide" it from the Wii U by using the PC tool UStealth. Almost all vWii homebrew apps will still be working fine with that.

So if you ask me for the "perfect setup" to date:
Use a 2 TB drive for the Wii U (method 1) and a FAT32 drive of any size for the vWii, hidden with Ustealth.

I'm having trouble creating a big FAT32 3tb partition using MBR instead of GPT. Whenever I create a MBR drive it only limits me to 2 TB. Can you help me out with that?

 

[ca032769]

I'm having trouble creating a big FAT32 3tb partition using MBR instead of GPT. Whenever I create a MBR drive it only limits me to 2 TB. Can you help me out with that?

Use FAT32 GUI Formatter:
-http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm
--32bit http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip
--64bit http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat-x64.Exe

 

[dthbxo]

Use FAT32 GUI Formatter:

Hi ca032769
I tried using that program but I keep getting "this drive is too big for FAT32 - a max 2TB supported error." I can use it if I use a minitool partition wizard to convert the drive to MBR but it only lets me use 2TB of the drive and not the full 3TB. I'm using a Toshiba 3TB Canvio Basics if that changes anything. Thanks for the reply.

 

[snoofly]

took me quite a few days to get it all right. but basically:

Wii U requires it's own hard drive no matter what and wii/gc require its own hard drive no matter what.
Wii U has a hard 2tb limit no matter what - so to best utilize it - I'd get a 3 or 4 tb hard drive (powered) depending on what's cheaper.
Wii/Gc/wiiware FULL collection is less than 5tb so I would get a 5 or 6 TB hard drive (WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK IS THE BEST FOR THIS ONE).

Use the WD quick formatter tool in xp compatability mode to turn your mybook into MBR format and then GUI formatter to format it into one huge fat32 partition. After installing all wii games, gc, emunand/sneek, wiiware, turn on ustealth and leave both drives plugged in at all times.

Just to say thanks for this advice. It was the only thing I found that got my WD Elements 4TB as one huge Fat32 MBR partition.

 

[ca032769]

Hi ca032769
I tried using that program but I keep getting "this drive is too big for FAT32 - a max 2TB supported error." I can use it if I use a minitool partition wizard to convert the drive to MBR but it only lets me use 2TB of the drive and not the full 3TB. I'm using a Toshiba 3TB Canvio Basics if that changes anything. Thanks for the reply.

Are you sure it's this exact tool you used. There are a couple with similar names. Download from the links posted and try it again. I've used it lots of times on several 4TB & 8TB HDDs. granted mine have all been external WD MyBooks, but that shouldn't matter for the tool to work.

You can also use EaseUS Partition Master to look at the drive to make sure something weird is not going on. If there are more then one partitions, even one with and astrix "*", merge them all together. EaseUS won't format a large drive past 2TB to FAT32, but it works great for seeing what's going on: http://www.easeus.com/partition-manager/epm-free.html

Not sure if it'll be helpful, but this is a link from a while ago when I original got things working on my 8TB:
http://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-loader-gx.149922/page-1132#post-6662953

 

[dthbxo]

Are you sure it's this exact tool you used. There are a couple with similar names. Download from the links posted and try it again. I've used it lots of times on several 4TB & 8TB HDDs. granted mine have all been external WD MyBooks, but that shouldn't matter for the tool to work.

You can also use EaseUS Partition Master to look at the drive to make sure something weird is not going on. If there are more then one partitions, even one with and astrix "*", merge them all together. EaseUS won't format a large drive past 2TB to FAT32, but it works great for seeing what's going on:

Not sure if it'll be helpful, but this is a link from a while ago when I original got things working on my 8TB:

Yes I used the ones from the link you sent in the last message. Using the EaseUS Partition Master, I saw 3 random small astrix partitions, but I couldn't merge them with the main ~2.70tb partition so I just reformatted to NTFS and they were all gone. But when I used the FAT32 Format tool from before it still gives me the same error as well. Perhaps it is because they are different hard drives since I cannot use WD quick formatter to create 3tb MBR partition and using MiniTool Partition Wizard only allows me to make a 2tb MBR partition.

 

[Cyan]

To format FAT32 bigger than 2TB, there are some requirements.

First, the issue is not FAT32 format itself, as it can support up to 16TB in one single partition.
The issue is the MBR partition table, which is based on 32bit values, and can only store limited numbers up to 0xFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal.
the MBR table's partition definition contains the partition type (FAT32, NTFS, etc.) the starting sector, and the size of the partition in sector numbers.
to fit on MBR, the FAT32 partition is limited to 2TB:

based on the 32 bit (0xFFFFFFFF = 4294967295), it means :
4,294,967,295 sectors * 512 bytes/sectors = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 2TB.


This is true ONLY for drives with 512 bytes per sector, which are now getting old. Most new drives are now manufactured with bigger sector size (usually 4096bytes/sector), which means :
4,294,967,295 sectors * 4096 bytes/sectors = 17,592,186,040,320 bytes or 17.6TB.

The issue is not always your drive, but the program you use to format or partition the drive.
Most program have hardcoded the 2TB limit, and don't try to format anything bigger even if the drive is not a 512bytes/sector size. (for example, Windows hardcoded size limit is 30GB )

Sometime, it's not the software's fault, but the way the HDD is seen by the software. To prevent old programs to break because of the hardcoded 512byte/sector, Manufacturers did an emulated layer to convert 512bytes access to bigger sector access (1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes/sectors). This is a micro-program running on the internal chipset of the HDD's mother board doing the conversion to fit multiple sent 512 bytes packets into a single sector.
The issue most users are encountering is that emulation mode ! the software still see the drive as 512 instead of 4k, and refuse to format it bigger than 2TB.

You need to switch off that emulation mode in order to let the software see the real sector size. personally, I think it's called backward :

Use the WD quick formatter tool in xp compatability mode.

putting the drive in "XP compatibility mode" should enabled the Advanced mode emulation (XP is not compatible with 4k and need to see the drive as 512bytes/sector) because old OS and program didn't even expect anything else than 512.
But I think it just disables the emulation mode and expose the real 4096bytes/sector size, actually "breaking" XP compatibility. (unless the problem with Windows XP is not the sector size but the emulation layer interface itself)

Anyway, whatever that option is called in your manufacturer's tool, that's what you need to do:
1. use a driver with sector size bigger than 512bytes (it's a hardware size, you can't edit it). VERY rare HDD bigger than 2TB will still use 512byte/sector, so you shouldn't have to worry about the sector size.
2. run the program, format the drive as "XP compatibility mode" or switch the "emulation mode" or e512 mode, and then you can format FAT32 partitions bigger than 2TB
Maybe you don't have any option, like explained in @ca032769's link posted above. formatting it to MBR was enough.

look here for some screenshot and guide :
https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-loader-gx.149922/page-1109#post-6429740 Start reading at "Other note". (note : it's from the same user who created this thread, maybe it will help more users if the first post was updated with that info)
You'll find links for both WD and Seagate drives.
For other brand, you'll have to search on your manufacturer's website.

 

[dthbxo]

To format FAT32 bigger than 2TB, there are some requirements.

First, the issue is not FAT32 format itself, as it can support up to 16TB in one single partition.
The issue is the MBR partition table, which is based on 32bit values, and can only store limited numbers up to 0xFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal.
the MBR table's partition definition contains the partition type (FAT32, NTFS, etc.) the starting sector, and the size of the partition in sector numbers.
to fit on MBR, the FAT32 partition is limited to 2TB:

based on the 32 bit (0xFFFFFFFF = 4294967295), it means :
4,294,967,295 sectors * 512 bytes/sectors = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 2TB.


This is true ONLY for drives with 512 bytes per sector, which are now getting old. Most new drives are now manufactured with bigger sector size (usually 4096bytes/sector), which means :
4,294,967,295 sectors * 4096 bytes/sectors = 17,592,186,040,320 bytes or 17.6TB.

The issue is not always your drive, but the program you use to format or partition the drive.
Most program have hardcoded the 2TB limit, and don't try to format anything bigger even if the drive is not a 512bytes/sector size. (for example, Windows hardcoded size limit is 30GB )

Sometime, it's not the software's fault, but the way the HDD is seen by the software. To prevent old programs to break because of the hardcoded 512byte/sector, Manufacturers did an emulated layer to convert 512bytes access to bigger sector access (1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes/sectors). This is a micro-program running on the internal chipset of the HDD's mother board doing the conversion to fit multiple sent 512 bytes packets into a single sector.
The issue most users are encountering is that emulation mode ! the software still see the drive as 512 instead of 4k, and refuse to format it bigger than 2TB.

You need to switch off that emulation mode in order to let the software see the real sector size. personally, I think it's called backward :

putting the drive in "XP compatibility mode" should enabled the Advanced mode emulation (XP is not compatible with 4k and need to see the drive as 512bytes/sector) because old OS and program didn't even expect anything else than 512.
But I think it just disables the emulation mode and expose the real 4096bytes/sector size, actually "breaking" XP compatibility. (unless the problem with Windows XP is not the sector size but the emulation layer interface itself)

Anyway, whatever that option is called in your manufacturer's tool, that's what you need to do:
1. use a driver with sector size bigger than 512bytes (it's a hardware size, you can't edit it). VERY rare HDD bigger than 2TB will still use 512byte/sector, so you shouldn't have to worry about the sector size.
2. run the program, format the drive as "XP compatibility mode" or switch the "emulation mode" or e512 mode, and then you can format FAT32 partitions bigger than 2TB
Maybe you don't have any option, like explained in @ca032769's link posted above. formatting it to MBR was enough.

look here for some screenshot and guide :
Start reading at "Other note". (note : it's from the same user who created this thread, maybe it will help more users if the first post was updated with that info)
You'll find links for both WD and Seagate drives.
For other brand, you'll have to search on your manufacturer's website.

Thanks for the explanation,
Unfortunately, Toshiba seems to not have any formatting software for the external hdd I have so I guess I am stuck with the 2TB limit
Thanks for the help anyway Cyan and ca032769

 

[snoofly]

took me quite a few days to get it all right. but basically:

Wii U requires it's own hard drive no matter what and wii/gc require its own hard drive no matter what.
Wii U has a hard 2tb limit no matter what - so to best utilize it - I'd get a 3 or 4 tb hard drive (powered) depending on what's cheaper.
Wii/Gc/wiiware FULL collection is less than 5tb so I would get a 5 or 6 TB hard drive (WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK IS THE BEST FOR THIS ONE).

Use the WD quick formatter tool in xp compatability mode to turn your mybook into MBR format and then GUI formatter to format it into one huge fat32 partition. After installing all wii games, gc, emunand/sneek, wiiware, turn on ustealth and leave both drives plugged in at all times.

having performed the same, this is the best config bar none. all title access, max compatibility. utilise my 300wiiu limit trick for full wiiu access and job done.

 

[Redirr]

Didn't read all post. But like i already said here many time before.

MBR/4Tb+ only works with special chips created but Seagate WD etc.

Its old already and was create to hold compatibility with Windows XP 32bits.

So. If you wanna 4Tb or 8Tb MBR. You will need to buy a old encloser from seagate. I know 3 models and i own then.

I used to have a 8TB Single partition MBR. In FAT32 64k with my PS3 working just fine.

So again. Wanna 8Tb working? Buy a old 4Tb HDD external and swap it internal HDD with 8Tb.

I have 3 models working MBR. But only 2 of then i recommend.

Many people says there way to format etc etc. But there is not.

Because MBR and 3Tb+ single partition its a chip feature not hardware HDD.

 

[brollikk]

the easiest way is just to get western digital my book hard drives. Their WD quick format tool in xp compatibility mode turns any size mybook into MBR right away. Then the guiformatter can make that into fat32 regardless of size. Yes, not all hard drives are capable of doing this - but for sure WD is able to. You can not go wrong - I've bought and returned several drives trying to get the perfect wii U set up until I finally got it.

 

[bostonBC]

Hi ca032769
I tried using that program but I keep getting "this drive is too big for FAT32 - a max 2TB supported error." I can use it if I use a minitool partition wizard to convert the drive to MBR but it only lets me use 2TB of the drive and not the full 3TB. I'm using a Toshiba 3TB Canvio Basics if that changes anything. Thanks for the reply.

Very few drives support MBR > 2TB.

The Samsung D3 drive cases do (I've tested them to 8TB).

You can buy them on eBay.

 

[snoofly]

the easiest way is just to get western digital my book hard drives. Their WD quick format tool in xp compatibility mode turns any size mybook into MBR right away. Then the guiformatter can make that into fat32 regardless of size. Yes, not all hard drives are capable of doing this - but for sure WD is able to. You can not go wrong - I've bought and returned several drives trying to get the perfect wii U set up until I finally got it.

I had to use WD quick format tool in order to format my WD Elements into a single 4TB FAT32 partition.
Oddly though, the option for XP compatibility mode did not appear during the process, even though the drive is >2Tb.
Still it seems to be fine and Disk Management shows it as a single partition.

 

[Prod1219]

@element6 did you ever figure out how to do this I’m currently trying to do the same thing

 

[brollikk]

@element6 did you ever figure out how to do this I’m currently trying to do the same thing

read my most recent post above. you NEED a western digital my book drive - these are guaranteed to work formatted in fat 32 and greater than 2 tb.

 

[Prod1219]

I’m trying to have a FAT32 partition for gc and another partition that is NTFS for Wii. I currently have a 4TB seagate hard drive.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

I’m trying to have a FAT32 partition for gc and another partition that is NTFS for Wii. I currently have a 4TB seagate hard drive.

@element6

 

[lordelan]

I’m trying to have a FAT32 partition for gc and another partition that is NTFS for Wii. I currently have a 4TB seagate hard drive.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------


@element6

Umm why? You shouldn't use NTFS at all.
You can have one big 4 TB FAT32 partition.

Be sure your drive uses MBR instead of GPT and use GUIformat to format it to FAT32.

Edit: Stick to this post which I found the most helpful -> https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-loader-gx.149922/page-1129#post-6662953

 

[Prod1219]

Umm why? You shouldn't use NTFS at all.
You can have one big 4 TB FAT32 partition.

Be sure your drive uses MBR instead of GPT and use GUIformat to format it to FAT32.

Yes I was just thinking about FAT since I realized you could. The thing is that Nintendont gives me an error saying that my main GameCube path needs to be set to primary. I’ve tried using GPT but Nintendont doesn’t support it from what I’ve read unless they updated it