Hacking Folders on usb hard drive changed to symbols, now not recognised!

[IanT]

Hi all,,

Ok I have followed the guide to hacking the vWii on the wiiU, I had everything working fine (should also add I've had the same thing on my wii for a year or so....), I tried to load a gamecube backup via usb loader gx, it went into Nintendont, I picked the game to load (wave race) it started to load then my Wii U reset itself. Now my usb hard drive isn't recognised in vWii mode and when I plug it into my pc all the folders have changed and been replaced by symbols - the actual space taken up on the hard drive is still the same so I'm guessing the backups are still there?

Question is can I restore the hard drive to how it was previously (if so how) or do I need to reformat it and go about the laborious task of backing up my wii and gamecube games again (about 211gb worth!)

 

[Cyan]

it's probably not possible to restore your drive in its working state.
the issue is FAT32 file table is messed up, and it's usually not recoverable
I think FAT32 file table has a backup, but I don't know if it's safe of corrupted as well. someone know more about it ?

the issue is that the console probably rebooted while something was writing to the drive (nintendont's creating the savegame maybe?) so the file's data is incomplete and the file table is corrupted.
you may have some file and folder still working, you can try to backup but it's more likely that some files will have corrupted data too.

the table says where the file is located, which sector it's using, and which filename to use, etc.
messing the file's location on the drive probably mixed file's data together.


note that it's not nintendont's fault, it can also happen on your computer. it's the "reboot" fault. that's why you should always "safely unplug" drives before unplugging them in case there are still active writing.
having backup of important data is always good. it's just that you probably lost savegames, and a lot of free time to fix it.

what I can suggest :
1. do not write anything else to the drive
2. try to recover what you can, but you may have to check file size and maybe even file's integrity :/ (game's sha1 etc.)
3. format the drive and start anew

4. maybe some tools could fix this problem, like Recuva? I don't know. I never had a success with a corrupted file table.

 

[IanT]

I've done a little reading around and may need to repair the partition on the disc? I've run chkdsk via command prompt on my pc which states there are no errors, when I've gone in to disk management it is showing up as healthy and about 226gb used which is what it was before.....

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@Cyan sorry i wrote that whilst you were replying! Ok so it sounds like I've probably lost most/all of what was on there then....I've found a program called GetDataBack which has run and found a load of files, presumably the backups judging by the sizes, along with a system volume information folder. I'm out of my depth here with how to use this but I#m going to have a fiddle and see if anything can be recovered. Failing that I've got a trip into the loft and lot of backing up to do!

 

[rpgaddict]

Did you run a full scan by running - CHKDSK "drive letter here": /f /r

note: I know one of those letters are redundant, but I can never remember which.

 

[IanT]

Did you run a full scan by running - CHKDSK "drive letter here": /f /r

note: I know one of those letters are redundant, but I can never remember which.

I ran a scan but only used one letter and the results came up pretty quickly, just trying it again with your suggestion.....seems to be taking a lot longer