Homebrew Cloning a HDD for a second WiiU?

ShamanMogz

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Hey all,

Im thinking of getting a second WiiU but I don't want to go through the painful hassle of installing the games on a second HDD, I would rather just clone the first HDD. Do you know if this is possible, or (as suspected) when the games are installed using WUP Installer GX2 are they then tied to that WiiU serial number? If by some miracle it is possible to clone, does this also work for injected (TeconMoon) games?

Thanks in Advance!
 
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godreborn

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you can extract iso files from wii games, yes, but cloning a drive to work on another wii u won't work. the wii u hdd is encrypted by the otp.bin and seeprom.bin. these are unique to the console. decrypting the hdd is possible, but the amount of work involved to get all games as installable again isn't worth it.
 

ShamanMogz

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Thanks guys, I thought that would be the case - I appreciate the quick answers and the tip on backing up the HDD out of interest is there any prefered software you use for this?
 

godreborn

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I'm not sure of a specific app, but you'd need to sector by sector clone the drive for it to work.

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

I'm not even sure that if you could use a cloned disk on another wii u that it would work correctly, because games are indexed (probably in the barista file) just like the ps3. however, the ps3 has a "rebuild database" feature to rescan the PARAM.SFO to repopulate the database or the metadata in the mms folder. the wii u has no such option. because it has no real recovery options, it makes messing with the system dangerous.

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

here's an interesting question: would buying a demo or something on the eshop rebuild the wii u's database? it does fix a corrupted database if say something won't delete or whatever. don't know if that would work or not.
 
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djpannda

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it would be easier to Hypothetically use USB Helper to download everything to a regually HDD (PC). That way you can have the app on a neutral HDD and install it separately to different Wii U formatted HHDs
 
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godreborn

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I did something similar. I wrote a text document of all of my games: sysnand means games I bought and rednand down below are cfw games or games I didn't buy. I wrote it a long time ago, hence the reason for rednand. that's in case I ever had to reinstall everything on another wii u:

upload_2021-6-30_13-41-41.png
 

Wiiufan

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I tried many ways to clone the WiiU HDD. Of course Windows\Linux didn't recognized HDD, let alone the WFS-File System. I used clonezilla and Acronis. Then I tried a clone-station from innotek. It cloned "something" successfully, but in the end the HDD was not recognized by the WiiU. After that I even tried a different device to clone to (SSD), of course without any useful result.

The only and best way is to just plug-in the second device to the WiiU (then format with WFS) and copy the games (you can check all the games in one step and let the WiiU work it's way through). Nowadays I would use a 256GB USB-Stick, that's not a problem anymore 10 years after WiiU premiered. Should be enough space for 30 Wiiu-Games or more.
 

Laf111

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same size HDD as the original HDD in order to clone i
i confirm this : cloning even sector by sector 2 HDD of different sizes failed.

Another thing, when you copy your games from the old to the new drive using the Wii-U, your saves are not copied !
You have to backup all saves for all users using SaveMii or Cemu2WiiU.
 
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sonictopfan

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i confirm this : cloning even sector by sector 2 HDD of different sizes failed.

Another thing, when you copy your games from the old to the new drive using the Wii-U, your saves are not copied !
You have to backup all saves for all users using SaveMii or Cemu2WiiU.
I plan on getting a bigger HDD at some point down the line, if I was to copy my entire data using the Wii U are you saying my save progress will be lost? What about dlc and updates? 😯

It sucks if I have to use SaveMii I kinda don’t fully trust it.
 

Laf111

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I plan on getting a bigger HDD at some point down the line, if I was to copy my entire data using the Wii U are you saying my save progress will be lost? What about dlc and updates? 😯

Yes, i am.

Games, Updates and DLC are copied .
ONLY saves are skipped (an explicit message will be displayed on your GamePad before launching the copy process).

EDIT :

SaveMii works great (create a backup of all games on the Sdcard, copy games, updates and DLC on the new game then restore the backup of saves).

I'm still having to finalize things on Cemu2Wii-U but you can use it for that purpose (you must run WiiuFtpServer on the Wii-U).
I'll tel you when it will be available.

Note that i didn't manage to copy all the games in a row. I don't know if it is my old HDD that was dying but i have to repeat the copy sequence many times.

One of the advantage of using Cemu2Wii-U for that matter is that it takes "snapshots" of the games and their location on the Wii-U file system. So it is very simple to know what games you have already copied and the ones that are still missing on the new HDD by taking 2 snapshots (one of the odl HDD and one for the new one)
 
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