Hacking 2T WD hard drive

[Tellos72]

Hi i have a 2T Western Digital Hard drive that i have used for Many wii game using USBLoader with out many issues, and now i have started wanting the Gamecube games to play off the same hard drive,so i partitioned about 1T x2 and reload the wii games on one partition only to find out that something is wrong with the other partition for the gamecube games.Can this be done off the same drive or am i out of luck here? Would like to keep all my games (500 to 900) on the same drive so i can get them off my pc for more room. Before i scrap my wii homebrew and start over would like to hear some options.

 

[migles]

IIRC gamecube games must be in the first parition, formatted as fat32, with a cluster size not above 32kb
it must be also a partition marked as active.

i am not sure if gamecube games require only 1 parition to be present on the HDD...

edit: what do you mean by something wrong? can you be specific about the issue?

 

[TecXero]

If you want to do anything more with your HDD than running Wii backups, then the first partition needs to be FAT32. It needs to be Primary, should have a sector size of 512kb (for best compatibility), and you should use MBR. The cluster size needs to be 32KB or smaller if you want to use DIOS MIOS. You can just have a single FAT32 partition take up the entire HDD and just use that for everything, but you'll have to split larger Wii backups. If you don't want to bother with splitting, you can create a second partition just for Wii backups. USB Loader GX can read from EXT2/3/4 and NTFS.

 

[Tellos72]

ok so make a partition Say G: then one Say H: making G: active ? Will usbloader find the H: drive for the wii back ups? And is that something i need to change in the usbloader settings? Dios Mios is what i have for the gamecube backups.And i read that the Fat23 drive needs to be labled Untitled for it to work. The partition for Usbloader was NTFS wand worked great so want to leave that the way it is for now.

 

[migles]

ok so make a partition Say G: then one Say H: making G: active ? Will usbloader find the H: drive for the wii back ups? And is that something i need to change in the usbloader settings? Dios Mios is what i have for the gamecube backups.And i read that the Fat23 drive needs to be labled Untitled for it to work. The partition for Usbloader was NTFS wand worked great so want to leave that the way it is for now.

never heard about being untitled. but it must be marked as active
open up computer management and mark it as active

and the games must be on a specific folder
can you please tell what the problem is?

 

[Tellos72]

I am using WBFS Manager 3.0 to load the wii backups to the drive and usbloader finds the drive and shows the games. Will it find the second partiton if i move them to IE drive H: or both Usbloader and Dios Mios have to be the first partition to find the games? I can make 2 usb flash drives for either one and it works but i want everything on the same 2tb hard drive so i dont have to keep changing the usb sticks when i want to change from a wii game to a gamecube game on the fly.

 

[migles]

I am using WBFS Manager 3.0 to load the wii backups to the drive and usbloader finds the drive and shows the games. Will it find the second partiton if i move them to IE drive H: or both Usbloader and Dios Mios have to be the first partition to find the games? I can make 2 usb flash drives for either one and it works but i want everything on the same 2tb hard drive so i dont have to keep changing the usb sticks when i want to change from a wii game to a gamecube game on the fly.

like i said earlyer, you have to put the dios mios games on first partition, and that partition must have a 32kb cluster and marked as active.
the second partition it can be whatever you want.
you can even use the whole 2tb drive if its propertly formatted..

 

[Tellos72]

ok will try that out and let you know how it worked. Do the wii backup have to be loaded to the drive with WBFS because it formats its own way or can the backups be on a fat32 or NTFS?

 

[DaMan4169]

Wii backups can be played from FAT32 or NTFS.
If your drive is FAT32 and your game exceeds the 4GB file limit, your USB loader will split it automatically when installing. I quit using WBFS Manager a long time ago and switched to Wii Backup Manager to handle my Wii Drive transfers, it will also split files at 2GB or 4GB for FAT32 drives.
If you are still using WBFS Manager 3.0, then your drive is WBFS formatted and not NTFS.

If you don't have the capacity to make a backup of your games, there is a program called wbfs2fat to convert your drive on-the-fly to FAT32, then I used Partition Master to convert to NTFS and resize the partition without data loss. Make the unallocated space fall before your current recently converted partition. Then make that new space a FAT32 partition with 32kb clusters and mark as active.

When I had converted from a single WBFS drive to a split drive, it was to test out NAND emulation but still needed FAT32 partition to be first and didn't have the storage capacity I have now. It took a while for the resizing because it has to move files to free up space at the beginning of the drive. I never tried GC loading but have recently considered giving Nintendont a try.

WiiFlow, CFG, and GX all support multiple partitions in their latest releases. There is a setting for different partitions on a single USB. WiiFlow is on page 1 of settings, CFG its in settings - system, GX it is settings - Hard drive. And you really should already have a cIOS of Wanin v18 or newer which is when the functionality was made (d2x is on its 10 version and that is the based off Wanin v21).

The d2x v10 alt added functionality for USB port 1 (port 0 is the default) so you could have 2 drives plugged in and just need to change a setting in your loader to change from one to the other. I'm sure there is a setting for changing from one USB port to the other or use both in GX (also in settings - Hard drive), not sure about the others but probably in with partitions if it can switch. And I guess the Hermes and Rodries cIOS222 had port1 support, which is IIRC where the d2x support came from...