Hardware Cannot Convert 4tb to MBR fat32 for Wii

[gonefishing1975]

Hey Guys

My buddy asked me to mod 2 of his Wii's. He bought two 4tb drives one a Western Digital the other a Seagate. Normally I just use cmd to convert them to MBR then use Wii Back Up Manager to format to Fat32. These two drives won't work as MBR on Fat32. If I convert them they only see the max of 2tb. I find NTFS on GUID doesn't work well for Wii and Gamecube games. I converted a few of my 4tb to MBR and Fat32 before no issues. Maybe I'm missing a step. Any ideas what might cause this?

Thanks

 

[nerubii]

you need either a sata to usb converter that translate the sector size or a dedicated hdd using the 4096 sector size. 512 sector size will not allow you to format into fat32 beyond 2tb.

Sent from my SM-N975F using Tapatalk

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Hey Guys

My buddy asked me to mod 2 of his Wii's. He bought two 4tb drives one a Western Digital the other a Seagate. Normally I just use cmd to convert them to MBR then use Wii Back Up Manager to format to Fat32. These two drives won't work as MBR on Fat32. If I convert them they only see the max of 2tb. I find NTFS on GUID doesn't work well for Wii and Gamecube games. I converted a few of my 4tb to MBR and Fat32 before no issues. Maybe I'm missing a step. Any ideas what might cause this?

Thanks

MBR is normally limited to max 2TB, but as the person above mentioned a larger sector size than 512 bytes allows larger drive sizes on MBR. Modern drives do use 4KB sector size, but a lot of them emulate a 512 byte sector size to provide backwards compatibility with older OSes and devices. And there is no way to turn that emulation off AFAIK. Meaning you have to somehow figure out before buying a drive if it has native 4K sector size. Of course 512b emulation drives will become less and less common with time as the need for backwards compatibility going that far back is reduced. But honestly? 2TB is more than you need for GC and Wii games so I'd just live with the loss or get him to return the drives and buy some 2.5" 2TB externals instead which will work just fine.

 

[nerubii]

MBR is normally limited to max 2TB, but as the person above mentioned a larger sector size than 512 bytes allows larger drive sizes on MBR. Modern drives do use 4KB sector size, but a lot of them emulate a 512 byte sector size to provide backwards compatibility with older OSes and devices. And there is no way to turn that emulation off AFAIK. Meaning you have to somehow figure out before buying a drive if it has native 4K sector size. Of course such drives will become less and less common with time as the need for backwards compatibility going that far back is reduced. But honestly? 2TB is more than you need for GC and Wii games so I'd just live with the loss or get him to return the drives and buy some 2.5" 2TB externals instead which will work just fine.

nope. i hv maxed out 4tb. using 4k sector hdd btw.

Sent from my SM-N975F using Tapatalk

 

[The Real Jdbye]

nope. i hv maxed out 4tb. using 4k sector hdd btw.

Sent from my SM-N975F using Tapatalk

I was agreeing with you, did you only read the first half sentence and respond without reading the rest?

 

[nerubii]

I was agreeing with you, did you only read the first half sentence and respond without reading the rest?

nope read everything. that's why the emphasis 4tb instead of 2tb.

back then, those slim adapters used to be sold on ebay around 10$ per piece. it has 4k sector support.

those adapters are taken out from mainly seagate portable hdd. probably the initial 4k hdd batch. subsequent batches seem to be on 512.

Sent from my SM-N975F using Tapatalk

 

[gonefishing1975]

K thanks guys

 

[gonefishing1975]

Question if i set his drive to guid and format as NTFS WiiFlow crashes when scanning for Wii & Cube games. Anything I can do about this? He wanted my entrie Wii and cube library which it over 3tb

 

[Extrems]

There's no support for 64-bit LBAs. I've done some of the work, but I can't get anything upstream.

 

[jeannotte]

Question if i set his drive to guid and format as NTFS WiiFlow crashes when scanning for Wii & Cube games. Anything I can do about this? He wanted my entrie Wii and cube library which it over 3tb

Hello,

Take a little tour here, for large external hard drives in large capacity (thank you @ca032769 ) ==> https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-loader-gx.149922/page-1129#post-6662953