Hacking 3 TB Seagate Works...

fig2k4

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Did you convert the drive to MBR, or does it actually work in CFG with GPT?

If you're using GPT, what did you use to initialise the drive? It looks like Windows Disk Management still has a limit of 2 TB with MBR even with 4K sectors. It was mentioned on the other thread that the MBR size limit should be higher.

I know GX has support for GPT, but you said it works in CFG too and you didn't mention any of this (or I'm just blind
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dexter222

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GUID/GPT doesn't even enter the equation (although we discussed it extensively in the GX thread).

The drive comes out of the box formatted MBR NTFS in one big partition. All you have to do is format it with WBM to WBFS. WBM automatically sees the 4k sector size and won't even let you change it. Wonderful software, by the way. I even donated
smile.gif
as should everyone who uses it *hint hint*

I use XP so GPT isn't really a consideration but I understand it's supported in 64bit windows 7. I suppose if someone were to re-partition the drive or experiment with the formatting in windows 7 it 'may' get changed to GPT... then you would have to, at some point, force it back into MBR and 4k sector size 'cause that's the only way it's gonna work.
 

fig2k4

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Right, so anyone else who isn't as lucky to already have an MBR disk would need to find some software that supports MBR with 4K sectors to reinitialise it. Otherwise the drive gets automatically split like was mentioned on the other thread, because Windows still uses the 2TB limit with MBR.

I suppose that's only a concern with CFG just now, because it would probably work with GX anyway.
 

PsyBlade

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I suggest linux fdisk if you really want to try it.
But I don't have a single drive big enough to try.
Beware: it might break software directly accessing (the OS eg) the disk in "interesting" ways.
There might or might not be a reason Windows disallows it.

PS you cant change the sector size of a drive in Software
its a HW (well FW to be anal) thing
 

dexter222

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Jonthom said:
Hi

Has anyone tried this with the Western Digital - My Book Essential 3TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive?

They are on sale right now fifty bucks cheaper than the Seagate goflex.

I just started testing one tonight. So far it's working pretty much like the seagate.

I've tested it on GX and CFG.

For some reason it takes a lot longer to get into GX with the Western Digital.
 

dexter222

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fig2k4 said:
Right, so anyone else who isn't as lucky to already have an MBR disk would need to find some software that supports MBR with 4K sectors to reinitialise it. Otherwise the drive gets automatically split like was mentioned on the other thread, because Windows still uses the 2TB limit with MBR.

NO.

Windows Disk Manager has NO problems deleting the partition(s) on the 3tb drive,
creating one large 2794.38 GB partition then formatting that single partition as one
single NTFS drive, after which it's an easy matter of formatting it to WBFS with
WBM 3.7 or 3.8.

I just did it to check out WBM 3.8 - very nice
smile.gif
the errors I got before with 3.7 no
longer show up. It also allows me the option of changing the formatting to 8k
sectors now, not that it makes any sense to do that.

I don't understand where the assumption comes in that windows would have trouble
handling the drive in one big partition. I bet that Windows Disk Management would
be able to handle single partition sizes up to 16tb without a problem.

So there are no misunderstandings, yes you CAN do everything you need to with
the 3tb drives with the disk management tools that come built into windows. These
3tb drives come pre-formatted MBR and, if you mess it up, it's an extremely simple
matter of deleting the partitions and starting over
smile.gif
 

fig2k4

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QUOTE said:
I don't understand where the assumption comes in that windows would have trouble
handling the drive in one big partition. I bet that Windows Disk Management would
be able to handle single partition sizes up to 16tb without a problem.

http://gbatemp.net/t279780-configurable-us...t&p=3470489

When he reinitialised the drive to use MBR, Windows automatically split the drive at the 2TB mark.

According to this and the "Partition Wizard" help files, the max MBR size supported is 2TB. I know that the 4K sector size should increase this to 16TB, but I'm not sure if there's any software that can actually do this. It looks like they're probably hard coded to handle the 2TB limit, instead of taking the sector size into account.

Once it's initialised correctly, any partitioning software would handle the drive OK. But if it's not set to MBR by the manufacturer then it would be good to know if there is a way to convert it. Maybe Seagate or WD has some software that can do it..

Again though, GX can probably handle the 3TB drive using GPT without any need to convert it. So maybe it would be better to just add GPT support to CFG anyway.
smile.gif
 

PsyBlade

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Maybe the drive isn't 4KiB but 512B , making it impossible to create one big MBR partition?


There are 4KiB drives whichs firmware make them appear as 512B drives by mapping 8 sectors to one.

512B MBRs aren't really limited to 2TiB total.
Only the beginning of a partition must be below the 2TiB border
and its size must be smaller than 2TiB.
Again something which I would rather avoid using.
 

dexter222

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fig2k4 said:
QUOTE said:
I don't understand where the assumption comes in that windows would have trouble
handling the drive in one big partition. I bet that Windows Disk Management would
be able to handle single partition sizes up to 16tb without a problem.

http://gbatemp.net/t279780-configurable-us...t&p=3470489

When he reinitialised the drive to use MBR, Windows automatically split the drive at the 2TB mark.

According to this and the "Partition Wizard" help files, the max MBR size supported is 2TB. I know that the 4K sector size should increase this to 16TB, but I'm not sure if there's any software that can actually do this. It looks like they're probably hard coded to handle the 2TB limit, instead of taking the sector size into account.

Once it's initialised correctly, any partitioning software would handle the drive OK. But if it's not set to MBR by the manufacturer then it would be good to know if there is a way to convert it. Maybe Seagate or WD has some software that can do it..

Again though, GX can probably handle the 3TB drive using GPT without any need to convert it. So maybe it would be better to just add GPT support to CFG anyway.
smile.gif

Ahhh yeah... The guy who's running Ubuntu - sorry I'm a bit rusty on my Unix and when I did use Unix extensively I always used a serious build, FreeBSD, not some hybrid toy OS like linux. Sorry I gave up on Linux in the slackware days. Besides... In Unix it's "slices" not "partitions" lol. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Ubuntu one of those "flavor of the day" linux releases based on debian? I look forward to your letters
biggrin.gif


I know... it's easy to assume just because someone says they're running a "PC" that means they are using XP. 4 to 5 people use XP over Vista and Windows 7. About 15 people use XP for every mac user. 20 to 25 people use XP for every one that uses FreeBSD, Linux, Windows 3.11, XP 64bit, server or NT, or any other OS not listed.

And that link you posted assumes all drives have a sector size of 512b. When you increase the sector size to 4k you increase the potential partition size as well. XP is perfectly capable of partitioning and formatting either of the 3tb drives we're talking about in one big partition. I'd tell you this even if you'd posted 20 links saying I can't. I've done it lol!

Once again, using XP, you will never, ever run into GUID/GPT - it may as well not exist. I'd even wager that, if you had a GPT drive, XP would simply handle it as a blank drive and format it MBR regardless.

Although Dimok says GX supports GPT that's not entirely the case. The Wii can supposedly support GPT up to the 2tb limit. Right now the only way to break the 2tb barrier is to use a drive with a larger sector size and format it WBFS.

Hopefully we'll see some of the libs rewritten that limit the Wii - namely the libs for NTFS and FAT32 that hard code the sector size to 512b and the USB libs that limit GPT to 2tb.
 

Jonthom

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dexter222 said:
Jonthom said:
Hi

Has anyone tried this with the Western Digital - My Book Essential 3TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive?

They are on sale right now fifty bucks cheaper than the Seagate goflex.

I just started testing one tonight. So far it's working pretty much like the seagate.

I've tested it on GX and CFG.

For some reason it takes a lot longer to get into GX with the Western Digital.


So does it work or not?
 

dexter222

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Jonthom said:
dexter222 said:
Jonthom said:
Hi

Has anyone tried this with the Western Digital - My Book Essential 3TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive?

They are on sale right now fifty bucks cheaper than the Seagate goflex.

I just started testing one tonight. So far it's working pretty much like the seagate.

I've tested it on GX and CFG.

For some reason it takes a lot longer to get into GX with the Western Digital.


So does it work or not?


yeah it works.

uhm it works I mean the WD drive but it freezes for about a full minute going into GX

both drives take about 8 seconds getting into CFG but the WD takes longer getting into GX like a full minute

I'm sorry I can't be more help. I have no idea why things work better in CFG than GX withe the WD drive.

I don't know why the seagate works better.
 

white_rice

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Hey guys.. first time posting on the forum although I've been reading for a few days and found the members here to be extremely helpful and informative. Anyways, I'm modding my 2nd Wii now, first was mine - and now for a friend. Everything went smooth as butter as far as modding the console via the Indiana Pwns procedure. However, I'm having complications now with his USB HDD. He purchased a brand new Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3.0TB External. I've been messing around with it for a couple days now and not getting much further now. I initially began by following the instructions @ http://www.wiihacks.com/recommended-faqs-g...ftmod-only.html of deleting the entire volume of the drive within Disk Management of Windows 7. Somehow throughout that procedure at one point, ended up seperating into a 2TB useable partition and a 1TB unuseable partition that had everything greyed out. I was able to later delete everything and regain it as 1 single 3TB partition again. I was unable to do anything with the drive with WBFS Manager, however it was suggested to us Wii Backup Manager, and this did in fact allow me to format the drive into WBFS format. So I did a test run and copies over 10 random 'backup's from my own 1TB external HD. Plugged it into my Wii and games loaded and played fine using Configurable USB Loader. So I decided to do a full copy over of my 200+ titles. Ran it overnight and most of the day. Plugged it in to my Wii again and now it doesn't work. When I fire up Configurable USB Loader it has a message re: OK: Invalid Parition. Thnen goes to a screen 'Warning: Partition was not found.' I then have a screen to choose a different partition. Only one is listed and shows up Size as '16384,00GB' ?? and the Type is 'UNK-ee' whatever that means? I also did as someone suggested and upgraded my version of Configurable USB Loader to v6.3 but this did not seem to help matters. When I go back into Windows Disk Management now it shows as a single partition as a Basic drive (MBR) at 2794.39 RAW, and shows as Healthy. I know it's formatted to WBFS as when I plug it into my Win7 laptop it right away says you need to format this drive before you can use it.

Anyways, if anyone has any ideas at all I'd really appreciate it as I'd like to get this problem resolved and not sure where to go from here.

Thank you
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dexter222

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I've never used Windows 7 but it sounds like you did everything right...

Is the partition set as a Primary partition?

I would delete the partition in case it somehow got corrupted. Then create it MBR as a Primary partition and quick format it NTFS. Then use Wii Backup Manager to format it WBFS. I've done this using Windows XP several times with the Goflex and the WD without problems. I tested it with about 20 games then installed 982 games with no problems, other than taking about 28 hrs.

About the only other thing different on my setup that I can think of is that I have USB 3.0 ports installed on the PC but that shouldn't make a difference except in speed.
 

white_rice

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Thanks for the quick reply. The drive is set as a primary partition. I will prob. take your advice tonight after work and start all over. Wasn't looking forward to that after 15+ hrs of transfer repeats, but I think I'm running out of choices! LOL Any ideas, what the type of UNK-ee is in reference to, or even why the drive size is showing so small within CFG USB Loader?

Thanks again@
 

PsyBlade

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"EE" Partition type means you are using GPT instead of MBR
GPT is only supported by very few wii homebrew
there are some threads about this iirc
 

white_rice

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PsyBlade said:
"EE" Partition type means you are using GPT instead of MBR
GPT is only supported by very few wii homebrew
there are some threads about this iirc

Thanks. I did a quick Google search to figure out how to switch between GPT - MBR. Following link very helpful -- http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26203...k-mbr-disk.html So anyways, I went ahead and deleted the volume on the external HD within Windows Disk Management. I then right clicked and did a 'Convert to MBR Disk'. As soon as I did this it took my single partition of 2794.39GB and switched it into 2 partitions, first one being 2048.00 and another at 746.52GB. I am able to right click on the first and larger of the 2 partitions to create a simple volume, however all the options are greyed out on the 2nd partition.
 

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Took me some time to figure that GPT-MBR problem. Glad there is a place like this to help people out.

I am in the same situation as you white_rice. From what I was able to understand from dexter222, the drives originally come with the entire 3TB drive as MBR. So if we had formatted it and played around with it and had it converted to GPT, we need to find a way to have the entire drive read while being MBR which may not be easy.
 

PsyBlade

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you sure this really is a 4KiB Sector drive?
caus if it uses or emulates 512B Sectors MBR partitions will be limited to 2TiB in size

Id avoid drives >2TiB for the next years
especally if its not going to be used in a PC
Solutions(GPT+EFI) to the hassle existed for years but are avoided by the windows world like hell
 

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