4TB Drive for Wii and GC not working

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Hi!
I decided to throw away my 10 year old 500GB wbfs drive and create a new 4TB setup on my WD Elements drive to play Wii and GC games from one drive over USB loader gx.
I can't format the drive to fat32 cause of new firmware blocking it.
I crated a GPT with a 650GB partition fat32 for GC and a 3TB ntfs partition for Wii.
Put 1 game in games folder on fat32 and 1 game on wbfs folder on ntfs. Worked.
Added all GC games, worked too. Added wii games and now USB loader gx crashes when it should display games with Exception dsi occurred error screen.
I tried different settings in USB loader gx, same result every time. I tried a 4TB seagate drive, same error.
So, is there something wrong with my setup? Anyone successfully using a 4TB for GC and Wii without having a full fat32 drive?
Thanks in advance

Shadow#1 · Sep 28, 2022

Peli86 said:
Hi!
I decided to throw away my 10 year old 500GB wbfs drive and create a new 4TB setup on my WD Elements drive to play Wii and GC games from one drive over USB loader gx.
I can't format the drive to fat32 cause of new firmware blocking it.
I crated a GPT with a 650GB partition fat32 for GC and a 3TB ntfs partition for Wii.
Put 1 game in games folder on fat32 and 1 game on wbfs folder on ntfs. Worked.
Added all GC games, worked too. Added wii games and now USB loader gx crashes when it should display games with Exception dsi occurred error screen.
I tried different settings in USB loader gx, same result every time. I tried a 4TB seagate drive, same error.
So, is there something wrong with my setup? Anyone successfully using a 4TB for GC and Wii without having a full fat32 drive?
Thanks in advance

will bot work fat32 has 2TB limit ONE PARTITION ONLY

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Wrong. It's possible to format to fat32 >2tb. See: https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-...-on-a-wii-as-a-single-fat32-partition.602038/

It's just not possible with my drive. And as I said, it worked when just a few games were transferred to my drive. Also, people using large drives with small fat32 + large ntfs (over 2tb), there is just something wrong with my setup and I want to know what it could be.

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

Try MBR as partitiontable (not GPT), but it will limit the partitionsize to 2TB. If it is a USB 3.0 only drive, use temporary a Y-Cable and plug it to a external powersupply with minimum 2A.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
Try MBR as partitiontable (not GPT), but it will limit the partitionsize to 2TB. If it is a USB 3.0 only drive, use temporary a Y-Cable and plug it to a external powersupply with minimum 2A.

Thanks for your reply. Yeah that's the problem, I need 4tb to store everything. I'm using a y-cable. Most confusing thing is that everything works fine until I add more games to the ntfs drive.

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

Could be a powerproblem to read the hole content from the drive. Therefore try temporary a externel powersupply with minimum 2Ampere.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
Could be a powerproblem to read the hole content from the drive. Therefore try temporary a externel powersupply with minimum 2Ampere.

I'll try that. Using both wii ports at the moment. Stupid question, can I use my Samsung Phone Charger or is that too "heavy"?

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

You can try that, better a solid one then a cheap manufactured. There is a difference between Phone Charger and Normal USB port. But cant tell atm. BTW one port on Wii back port is underpowered and doesnt provide the power it should. Especially it could be a poblem if your drive is only USB 3.0 specified for a 900mA USB-Port, A USB 2.0/3.0 should work without any Problems with Y-Cable plugged to Wii.

And the max size for fat32 is limited trough the physical sector size of the drive. By 512b its therefore max 2TB. By 4096b (4Kb) it can be theoretically allocate 16TB with used 64 kb allocation unit, 32kb will limit it to 8TB.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
You can try that, better a solid one then a cheap manufactured. There is a difference between Phone Charger and Normal USB port. But cant tell atm. BTW one port on Wii back port is underpowered and doesnt provide the power it should.

So, power was not the issue, Same error.
I reset USB loader gx to default, my GC games show up, they start and I can play them. No wii games. When I select a drive/partition in USB loader gx and click back, I get fragments and a crash, back to the homebrew channel. I'll try to make 2 ntfs partitions with 1,5TB each instead of 1 ntfs with 3TB.
Edit to delete useless informations.

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

??? Sorry, never heard that a external Powersupply attached to a y-Cable broke some system. Its a standart setup wich a lot of guys use on Wii/WiiU. External Powersupply provide power which can be pulled, they are not pushing them. Or did you put the wrong end in? But this cant be a probelm. The short goes to additional powersource.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
??? Sorry, never heard that a external Powersupply attached to a y-Cable broke some system. Its a standart setup wich a lot of guys use on Wii/WiiU. External Powersupply provide power which can be pulled, they are not pushing them.

That's what happend, but I edited my post. Guess that wasn't a power problem.

Robru1 · Sep 28, 2022

Is there a maximum size for external storage devices used with Wii U?

If the Wii U has the most recent system update installed, it will be able to recognize a storage device of any size, but 2TB will be the maximum amount of storage capacity that can be used. Any extra capacity in the storage device beyond the 2TB will not be accessible via the Wii U.

CoolMe · Sep 28, 2022

Peli86 said:
I crated a GPT with a 650GB partition

You'd need to set it to MBR, and to have a primary partition.
Are you transferring Wii games with WiiBackupManager?
Post a syscheck here.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

CoolMe said:
You'd need to set it to MBR, and to have a primary partition.
Are you transferring Wii games with WiiBackupManager?
Post a syscheck here.

MBR is not possible, cause I need to use full 4TB. I copy my wbfs-format games into the wbfs folder of my ntfs partition without wii backup manager. It's not needed for ntfs, not large files are split to be under 4GB.

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

The wii Backup Manager will copy the games directly in correct specific path and performs additional a hash value comparism to verify the integrity of the game image.

Iam thinking als also about a partition problem with primary (active/nonactive), extended and logical artition.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
The wii Backup Manager will copy the games directly in correct specific path and performs additional a hash value comparism to verify the integrity of the game image.

Iam thinking als also about a partition problem with primary (active/nonactive), extended and logical artition.

I'll try it with partitions under 2tb first. If that doesn't solve it I'll try WBM. I can see my partitions have no status (like active and non active). Can't try to change it right now, but I think it was not possible to set one to active/primary cause of GPT and/or drive size. How should it be to work correctly?

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

Normal the first partition is set to active, the active marks where the OS is located and the bios should boot it from. I dont know if it change something in case of USB-Loader GX.
I wonder why you can display GC form fat32 and Wii from ntfs if its single game on the drive, and give errors if there are multile Wii games located on ntfs. If you are using latest USB-loader GX version 1272 or 1272 mod7, you can try using ios 58 (standart USB 2.0 support) as loader ios, but then you need to patch the ios 251 with dx2 base 58, if not already done and set it as game ios. There are also working setups descriped which use the first as ntfs and second as fat32 partition, but only for use with USB-Loader-GX and Nintendont.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
Normal the first partition is set to active, the active marks where the OS is located and the bios should boot it from. I dont know if it change something in case of USB-Loader GX.
I wonder why you can display GC form fat32 and Wii from ntfs if its single game on the drive, and give errors if there are multile Wii games located on ntfs. If you are using latest USB-loader GX version 1272 or 1272 mod7, you can try using ios 58 (standart USB 2.0 support) as loader ios, but then you need to patch the ios 251 with dx2 base 58, if not already done and set it as game ios. There are also working setups descriped which use the first as ntfs and second as fat32 partition, but only for use with USB-Loader-GX and Nintendont.

Peli86 · Sep 28, 2022

Sypherone said:
Normal the first partition is set to active, the active marks where the OS is located and the bios should boot it from. I dont know if it change something in case of USB-Loader GX.
I wonder why you can display GC form fat32 and Wii from ntfs if its single game on the drive, and give errors if there are multile Wii games located on ntfs. If you are using latest USB-loader GX version 1272 or 1272 mod7, you can try using ios 58 (standart USB 2.0 support) as loader ios, but then you need to patch the ios 251 with dx2 base 58, if not already done and set it as game ios. There are also working setups descriped which use the first as ntfs and second as fat32 partition, but only for use with USB-Loader-GX and Nintendont.

Using USB loader gx and Nintendont is all I need. I use version 1272, but tried older versions, same problem. That it works with one game, also with 10 games, but not with more is what gives me headaches. That's why I'll try to make all partitions under 2tb now. Takes a while to resize and moving files. So annoying. I wish I had a old WD drive and could just use one single fat32 4tb drive.

Sypherone · Sep 28, 2022

Ya, thats headache. Normaly using MBR is standard, but then your limited to 2TB. If your using GPT the compatibilty/recognizen goes down, then your drives needs to have a phyical sector size of 4KB (4096B) to be able to format the drive with 32k cluster size up to 8TB. Maybe this mentioned "fake MBR" would be a solution, but never used it on my own.

4TB Drive for Wii and GC not working

Active Member

Wii, 3DS Softmod & Dumpster Diving Expert

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Active Member

Active Member

Is there a maximum size for external storage devices used with Wii U?​

"Who am i, what am i?"

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Active Member

Active Member

Gaming Ninja

Similar threads

Popular threads in this forum

Is there a maximum size for external storage devices used with Wii U?