Nope, you lost your backups. There is no wbfs partition manager. There is no way to recover your backups because no data recovery tool recognizes the wbfs format. I searched all over the net for a week and came up empty. I would love to have someone prove me wrong cause it's happened to me twice.

 

im pretty sure that partition is toast

i personaly use 1hdd for games and 1 seperate for wiiware/vc and the sd card for apps

 

I'd like to hear more about these command line tools your talking about that deal with wbfs partitioning and forcing parameters ???

I'm no expert but even if you could somehow force some parameters with a tool the index would more than likely be junk and you'd still be left with a partition with unreadable material because as I stated before there are no tools (that I know of) to recover raw wbfs data. If there is such a program, command line based or not, please name some names cause I'm going to do some experimenting on data recovery from a wbfs drive if there is such an app.

 

Yeah that's what I'm sayin, It would really be nice if someone could write us a tool that actually did partitioning and data recovery for wbfs. I'd be in heaven.

 

I dont believe I can change the partition size back (has to do with placement of the partitions and where the data is in each partition). Since my WBFS partition is the first on the drive I thought I would be able to trick the system into thinking it should be a smaller partition now OR a way to force a utility to see my backups, so that I can copy them to another drive. I would prefer the former since I dont have to waste any time making copies to another drive, and then reformatting the WBFS partition and then copying them back. I've never deleted any backups from my WBFS partition prior to this mistake. I've seen another thread where people accidently reformated their WBFS partition and were able to get their games back using a partition hex editor. I may try that but I wanted to know if there was another solution.

Does anyone know when the WBFS partition is formated, where the sectors or size of the parition is stored... so that maybe I can hexedit the value to be the smaller value.

 

I'll give force mode a try eventually, but I was looking to avoid the time & HD space needed to copy the games backups back and forth. (looking for a shortcut so I dont have to open/install a new HD) I'll give your update a try when you make it available.

Regarding your comment about WBFS partition size and sectors though... would that calculation be any different than how the norton partition software removed it as well (because I resized about 32 megs smaller [not gigs] and it's isnt unallocated anymore.. it was given to the adjecent partition which I beleive is NTFS formated). I want to make certain that what I do about the WBFS partition doesnt cross over and corrupt my adjecent NTFS partition

 

I have more supporting info for my situation

in norton partition magic 8, my WBFS partition properties is now
First physical sector 63 cyl 0 hd 1 sect 1 (I believe this did not change)
Last physical sector 911,174,669 cyl 56717 hd 254 sect 63 (I believe this was decreased)
total physical sectors 911,174,607 = 444,909.5 mb (previously it was around 444,940.?? mb)

The properties for the second partition (NTFS) is now
first physical sector 911,174,733 cyl 56718 hd 1 sect 1

sector 63 starts like the following
57 42 46 53 36 50 66 D3 09 17 00 00 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

so what should my WBFS header be set/changed to based on the numbers above?

 

Since I decreased my WBFS partition size by only a little bit... I dont think the wbfs sector/cluster size (byte 10, value of 17) would not need to be changed Wouldnt I just need to change the partition size (header bytes 5 thru 8) to 36 4F 6B CF (=911174607)?
(like I stated earlier, I only added about 40 games to my WBFS partition priorhand... I never deleted any so I dont think any other cleanup is needed. )

 

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to remount... but here are the results
When selecting drive with the bad partition header it gave me an error.
I selected the option to force and deselected/reselected the drive
I was able to see my 42 games.
I tried recover mode too but I didnt see any difference than using force
I believe my wbfs header remained untouched physically

thanks for the help

 

I did some more playing around with WWT and it seems that somewhere between 270 and 280 gigs is where the 10th byte of the header changes from 16 to 17 so it would seem I could theoretically decrease the size of my wbfs partition from 440gig to 280 gig without any ill effects as long as all of the existing data on the wbfs partition is in the first 280 gigs of the partition (which is should be since I have only loaded about 100 gig of files without deleting any) and I change the 5 thru 8th bytes of the header with the parition size. I am not going to test this out yet... until I backup my files from the WBFS partition to WBFS files on another drive... (but I wont be doing this for another week or so) I will report my findings here after I'm done.