desperate kids lost wii games from loader drive

Timbiotic · Thursday at 7:48 PM

Full story, I have not touched our modded WII U in ages. The kids play the WII games all the time. I wanted to add a WII game for them but windows didnt recognize the disc. And i think windows did something to the drive because now its not recognized by GX or windows, and partitions seem flakey. Using Google AI to help me recover I ran "testdisc_win" and analyzing i found 3 "deleted" or "d" partitions. I have played with making them "P" as i think they were all marked "d" to start. But i cant even remember now. I was able to recover 1 game on the 3rd partition but there should be a ton of them. Any suggestions to save their games? I cant remember if the saved games info is on the SD card or the loader gx. Its their saves i am really worried about. I could format and repopulate the drive no issue. But I think from what i have read the saved games are on the loader usb drive?

Any advice welcome. I cant remember if its WBFS , fat32, or ntfs, but my guess is some form of wbfs as windows would not recognize it.

Fien · Thursday at 11:19 PM

Normally a Wii (or Wii mode on a Wii U) stores the save data on the internal memory of the console, unless emunand is used.

You can check if the save data is on the internal memory in the "Data management" => "Save data" menu of the Wii.

snsclziklost · Thursday at 11:32 PM

you can load a wbfs formatted drive with wii backup manager on pc. But if you fiddled with them a bunch, you mightve broken your compatibility going forward. Worth a try though. Just install the program, and use the option to open a drive.

copy the games to your computer if you can see them, so you can switch to a fat32 going forward and be done with the WBFS drive

saves should just be on the console itself

Timbiotic · 2026-09-04T12:43:57+0100

i could only see 1 on the third partition when i made it active. But if saves are on console itself i will just format and reload i think

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 2:31 PM

i am not at home now , but did some more reading, in process of trying to get this all to work i reset the GX loader to default settings. I cant remember if i used emunand to move saved games to SD or USB. Hopefully i did not, but if i did, is there a place to check the SD card to see if they are on it?

snsclziklost · 2026-09-04T14:54:12+0100

fake/emu/rednands arent something ive messed with. good luck.
hope you left your saves where you can get em.

Timbiotic · 2026-09-04T15:01:29+0100

Fien said:
Normally a Wii (or Wii mode on a Wii U) stores the save data on the internal memory of the console, unless emunand is used.

You can check if the save data is on the internal memory in the "Data management" => "Save data" menu of the Wii.

I am not home, but this is a modded Wii U that also has the WII mode setup. Would i check that once in the Wii mode? Or does the WiiU root menu have saved games for both.

snsclziklost · 2026-09-04T15:06:32+0100

you'd check in wii mode...and since we're talking about a wii u, the drive partition you cant see was/is probably a wii u partition

Timbiotic · 2026-09-04T15:19:59+0100

wait so the usb drive would have both wii u and wii games on it with different partitions i was thinking the wii u games were on my sd card as I still see games on it

snsclziklost · 2026-09-04T15:22:24+0100

Timbiotic said:
wait so the usb drive would have both wii u and wii games on it with different partitions i was thinking the wii u games were on my sd card as I still see games on it

all kinds of setups have been possible. I only say the partition you cant see is probably a wii u partition, because computers cant read wii u partitions normally, and your setup is probably not old enough for the old "WBFS-formatted partitions" because that was around and then moved on from before wii u even came out.

but you can have games anywhere, and you can have fake nands anywhere. all have been done, basically.

Timbiotic · 2026-09-05T17:38:56+0100

So i got the games loaded but i cannot get usb loader to boot no matter what. When the wii u first starts it wants to format the hard drive . i have a really old CBHC firmware and I wonder if that is it. Or my monkeying with updating it.

1. Tried a usb 128 pny drive formatted with WiiBackupManager78, tried both Fat32 and WBFS. Both times just timed out waiting for drive then crashed to main vwii menu.
2. Tried formatting the original external drive with WiiBackupManager78 to WBFS, same exact symptoms. So i tried adding one game to SD card using WiiBAckupManager78 since i saw it had SD mode. But even when i hit b for SD mode it crashed to vwii menu.

Any suggestions now? I am tempted to uninstall CBHC firmware and try the newer aroma. I am using port 0 and I know the wii sees something as it wants to format everything i put in. Should i have wii format it, then try to add games with backup manager? I even tried reverting back to older usb loader gx i started with. Also I tried to install the vwii d2x cios installer as well.

Thinking maybe i need to somehow "install" usb loader gx instead of replacing files? OR maybe its resetting to defaults messed it up. I am at a loss. Also did some WAD so usb loader gx shows up on main menu awhile back. Not sure if that would mess with the new version.

desperate kids lost wii games from loader drive

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