Hardware Can you make a Wii U Partition?

[drfsupercenter]

I hate to grave dig an old thread, but I just got my Wii U... and tested out a USB flash drive. Interestingly enough, after it gets formatted by the Wii U, it shows as completely unallocated space in GParted, which is usually able to detect all kinds of fancy filesystems.

In fact, GParted would probably let me make a partition on the drive (that's different than formatting the drive, as you aren't rewriting the MBR at all)... but that would obviously wipe out the Wii U portion of it.

Does anyone know how exactly it formats drives? I know for example, the Xbox 360 uses FATX which is just a bunch of files stored on an ordinary FAT32 partition so you CAN only allocate part of the space and use the rest normally. I don't think the PS3 supports external drives for storage so I'm not sure on that one.

 

[Cyan]

The WiiU formats the drive entirely starting from sector 0 (so replacing the MBR, partition table used by computer).
That's why GParted don't see any partition and tell you it's unallocated (because it doesn't know the format, there's no table at all, so for GParted it can't even tell you that there's a single partition without table)

I don't think you can add a partition without referencing it in a table (even if it's theoretically possible).
If you create a table, it will delete sector 0 and will corrupt the entire WiiU partition.
If you create a partition without a table, it will corrupt the partition at the physical place/sector where you created your partition. As long as the WiiU doesn't decrypt the entire partition when mounting it (decrypt only references sectors in its own encrypted table), you can have your partition cohabiting, but no program will be able to access it as it won't be references by any partition table unless you provide the exact starting sector number manually.

 

[drfsupercenter]

OK, that makes sense.

Well that's unfortunate. I was hoping there was some way to back save files up like we can do with the Wii's SD cards... hopefully at some point in the future somebody will figure out the partition structure and write a tool to read/write it. I guess for now I'll wait.