Hacking Easiest/best way to hack a Wii?

[Originality]

NeoGamma will load GC games from a backup DVD. This requires a patched MIOS but that's easy to find. There is currently no known way to load GC from USB due to the nature of MIOS and "GC Mode" (which doesn't allow use of the SD or USB ports). VC games are installed from WADs using Waninkoko's WADManager. EDIT: Other than that, if you want, you can also use NeoGamma or WiiGator's 0.3 Gamma to load backups from DVD, if you prefer tactile (albeit 2x slower) media, but from the sounds of things you'd prefer the USB Loader. Moving on:

To play games with a USB Loader, you need to do 3 things. First, install a cIOS as you should have already (I use rev10 but most use rev13a or rev13b).
Second, format your USB media to WBFS. If you have a large exHDD like me (1TB), then you can make this partition much smaller (200GB for WBFS, 400GB for backups, and the rest for NTFS) and use the rest how you like. FAT32 is useful as other programs you might take up (GeekBox i think it was called, or SuperDumper, or MediaPlayerCE) use it, however it can't take normal 4.3GB ISO files so I've always preferred NTFS on that particular exHDD.
Lastly, use a WBFS manager (such as the aforementioned AlexDP's WBFS Manager) to copy your backup games from ISO to WBFS drive. This can take 5-30 minutes per game, and twice that if your ISO's are compressed in RARs (which AlexDP's app will automatically extract for you), but once it's finally on there, you just plug your exHDD into the Wii (try both slots since cIOS rev13 allocates one port for drives and the other for periferals), load your preferred USB Loader (I prefer USBL GX but NeoGamma is also good) and play.

Sorry if that looks/sounds long winded, but it really is simple. I just made it look longer to give you more of the information you seem to desire ;p

 

[FullgoreEXE]

Still having trouble with getting the preloader 0.29 to recognize the hacks.ini .. I tried every solution listed in that topic and it doesn't work.. Do I absolutely need preloader to work?

As for the whole USB loader, I don't get the whole partition thing. I was actually kind of hoping I could install games through my USB Memory stick - It's like.. 32GB? Pretty damn big for a memory stick. When I try to format it, I can only format it in FAT32, NTFS, a few other things, but not WBFS. How do I format it to WBFS, or do I need an external HDD?

~

 

[FullgoreEXE]

*shameless bump* ;-;

 

[FullgoreEXE]

One more bump :/

 

[BARR3RA]

Download WBFS Manager or Wuyou, and the program has a "Format" button that formats it to WBFS (Wii Backup File System). **THIS WILL DELETE EVERYTHING THAT IS ON YOUR MEMORY STICK**

 

[FullgoreEXE]

Thank you muchly.

"Still having trouble with getting the preloader 0.29 to recognize the hacks.ini .. I tried every solution listed in that topic and it doesn't work.. Do I absolutely need preloader to work?"

Do you know anything about this? I still can't get it to see the hacks.ini file.

 

[Originality]

All I know about preloader is that it seems not to like SDHC. I've heard it can supposedly read the ini from USB, but this is unconfirmed. If you've got a small SD card laying around (like from a camera or something) then try using that. I've also heard that having your SD card formatted in FAT and not FAT32 might help, but I've yet to see any difference between them in any homebrew.