Hacking Anyone's checked out this method to have a Wii U Partition?

[EstPC13]

I found it on an old thread, and thought I might bring it up again now that USB'S are much more important (credit to @KDH):

Actually I was wrong earlier. It doesn't block drives with HPA, it DOES block GPT drives where it can't find the backup table (since it needs to delete it I guess) and ignores drives that go beyond it's own partition table (yes, I was wrong about that too, parted, gdisk, and fdisk just don't differentiate between "unknown" and "none", dmesg had to set me straight there). So there you have it. If you have tools that can mount a partition using only the backup GPT table without restoring it you can have a Wii U "partition" by following these steps:

1. create GPT partition table across the entire disk
2. create a partition at the end of the disk
3. find out how many sectors that partition has
4. find out how many sectors the disk has
5. subtract partition sectors from disk sectors
6. set up HPA using the result from step 5 + ~100 (eg: hdparm -N pSTEP_5_RESULT+100 --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing TARGET_HDD)
7. create a BRAND NEW GPT table across the now accessible area of the disk
8. plug the drive into the Wii U and let it format the disk

Congratulations, you're done. You now have a way to use the same HDD on your computer and your Wii U. Just temporarily remove the HPA every time you plug it into the computer. Personally though, I think it's more trouble than it's worth when you can find good 500GB HDDs for as low as $30 at walmart, but that's how to do it, assuming you have the right tools.

 

[shaneod]

This is interesting stuff.
I wonder if vWii homebrew could temporarily make the partition visible in the same way that linux would.
That way you could use the same drive for Wii U and vWii.