Hacking Feedback Homebrew Wii Hdd shuts off when a loader tries to access it?

SpiderSanti · 2026-08-07T09:20:40+0100

Hi, I'm new to these forums so sorry if I'm not making this thing correctly or something, but anyway,
I got this 2tb drive ( a lacie 2tb mobile drive secure [the "secure part is fully disabled btw"]) and i fomatted it to ntfs because usb loadergx supports it i guess.
Here is where the problem comes in, whenever loader GX tried to "Reinitialize Device" the damn thing would just shut off and automatically boot into sd card mode,
that is... until I unplugged and replugged it in during this "reinitialization phase" and suddenly all my games loaded?
BUT NOW I have to unplug it and plug it bacck in when trying to LOAD a game, otherwise itll just show a black screen?
I thought maybe because it was formatted as NTFS i should set it to fat32 with 32k clusters or whatever the Wii wants? So I reformatted it as that.
but THAT DIDN'T SOLVE IT and worst of all, other loaders can't access it without me unplugging it and replugging it back in!
Configurable USB loader needs this, and WiiFlow wont even read it at all??
Please help me, the drive hurt my wallet a lot and I can't even test out other drives to see if its just my Wii being dumb
I do not want to replug it back in every single time I want to play.

JuanMena · 2026-08-08T00:24:30+0100

Try CFG USB Loader.
If CFG USB Loader fails, then yes it might be your drive.

SpiderSanti · 2026-08-08T00:40:18+0100

JuanMena said:
Try CFG USB Loader.
If CFG USB Loader fails, then yes it might be your drive.

yea i already tried that one and it gave me the same problem, at this point im giving up and will use the drive on my pc instead.
not only was it super annoying, but i was trying to install a disc i had onto the drive through usb loader gx and after it finished it deleted ALL OF MY GAMES, so im just gonna mark this as unsolved or something because wow that was rage inducing

tmnr1992 · 2026-08-08T00:49:05+0100

Make sure the drive is connected to the bottom port. I would recommend USB Loader GX as it's the most up to date, Wiiflow should also work but in my experience it can be a bit unstable sometimes. Remove the SD card and try booting USB Loader from the HDD to see if it makes any difference, in the settings menu set the loader and game cIOS to 249. NTFS should work but I've had the best results with fat32 and 32k cluster size. Also make sure your cIOS are up to date.

Exidous · 2026-08-08T01:05:39+0100

Regarding USB Loader GX, it sounds like you're saying the software is crashing on Wii, rather than merely failing to reinitialize the usb hard drive. If the software is hard crashing and the Wii is rebooting inappropriately, that sounds like a serious issue.

Understand that the USB loaders' normal behavior is to try the alternative path if USB/SD failed after a certain number of retries. So if it's just booting the next time, and changing its default to the SD card after it tried and failed to use USB a number of times, that's normal (if annoying).

Best practices:

FAT32, 32k cluster size.

I'm surprised to hear that Wiiflow isn't loading from USB at all. You're using the default folder structure right? USB:/wbfs for Wii and USB:/games/[gamefolder]/game.iso for gamecube.

Hardware tips:

Wii is from the USB 2.0 era, those are the drives it works best with. New, USB 3.0 stuff seems to have a higher chance of incompatibilities. I personally had to deal with a lot of early 3.0 drives with their own spindown and other unwanted behaviors that the Wii couldn't really influence or control. Some newer drives have software that lets you modify their firmware behavior (from a PC), but with many you're just stuck with inappropriate behavior on Wii.

JuanMena · 2026-08-08T01:34:27+0100

SpiderSanti said:
yea i already tried that one and it gave me the same problem, at this point im giving up and will use the drive on my pc instead.
not only was it super annoying, but i was trying to install a disc i had onto the drive through usb loader gx and after it finished it deleted ALL OF MY GAMES, so im just gonna mark this as unsolved or something because wow that was rage inducing

Have you checked if your drive is formatear with MBR Partition instead of the other one? (GPT or something like that).

If you're willing to try again, use Rufus to format your HDD as:
- Fat32
- 32K Cluster Size
- MBR Partition

Hacking Feedback Homebrew Wii Hdd shuts off when a loader tries to access it?

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