Hardware HDD and Game file Backup/Transfer Issues: Please Help

[gambitking]

Hello, I have a couple of issues that are officially driving me crazy. I have many games backed up on an external HDD. They played okay for a while, but most of the time they freeze up after a little while of playing.

After my research, I concluded this is a possible spin-down issue. I searched for a remedy for this problem and so far have come up with no good solutions.

I'm using USB Loader GX on my soft-modded wii (with homebrew).

My external drive is a 750GB Western Digital Caviar Green Drive (WD7500ACS). It's in a WD MyBook Legacy Premium enclosure.The entire drive is partitioned to WBFS. Some of my games on the drive were transferred to it from my PC using Wii Backup Manager. Others were simply burned to the drive from game discs using the Wii and USB loader's install utility.

I have no problem burning games from disc. Almost all my games play fine until the inevitable freeze-up, usually about 30-45 minutes in.

Apparently, WD does not have a way to disable power saving or spindown on green drives. So, I am realizing that if I cannot solve this problem, I will eventually break down and get a different HD. But I know I'll need to backup my games on my PC hard drive. So I fired up Wii backup manager and hooked up my external HDD with all my games on it. I started trying to move the game files from the external HD to my PC local hard drive (NTFS) and I got a few copied over, but then it crapped out and failed the remainder of the transfers. I tried several different files, some of them will transfer one at a time, some simply just fail mid-way through and I've seen many game titles showing up in red after the transfer (meaning it didn't work). I tried setting the option that lets you "Use ISO on NTFS drives" and still have difficulties.

So, my problem is two-fold I suppose... I need a solution for the spindown issues on my WD Caviar Green drive, and to find out why I'm having so much trouble transferring from my external HD to my PC with Wii Backup manager.

Sorry for the wall of text, thanks in advance. (please let me know if I need to provide any other info).

 

[PsyBlade]

your WBFS is probably messed up
happens to almost everyone eventually

check the WBFS partition for errors using wiimms wwt with the CHECK option (sig)

I suggest you consider FAT32 for the new drive
would have the additional benefit of HBC, DM, devolution, ... too

 

[gambitking]

Hi PsyBlade, and thanks for this suggestion, I had not investigated this possibility. I took your advice and ran the wwt CHECK command, found 447 errors whatever that means, but it doesn't sound good.

"447 Free WBFS sectors marked as used!"

So what now? And what's the best method for best results to avoid this in the future and still have a stable and optimum experience?

 

[PsyBlade]

as I said to avoid it simply don't use WBFS, use FAT32 instead
many WBFS tools are broken with no easy way of identifing which ones exactly (but generally newer = better)

that particular error is not really a problem, it just means that you missed some free space (but 477 blocks is lot considering each block is probably 2MiB or larger)

you can use wwts VERIFY function to scan the games more thoroughly

 

[gambitking]

Okay, I've seen the majority of people have better success with FAT32, so my problems now are two-fold:

I have games on the external HD (WBFS format) that I need to back up, but I'm having trouble transferring them via wii backup manager .... and.... when I previously tried to format with a FAT32 partition, my system was saying it was going to take an ungodly amount of time, like many many hours. Something didn't seem right about that.

What function must I use in wwt to repair this partition so that I might have a better chance at getting my games transferred off my HDD to my PC?

 

[PsyBlade]

REPAIR ...
but I don't have much experience with it - see wwt HELP REPAIR for details

you could try to copy the games with wwt instead (COPY iirc)
wwt HELP for even more functions

 

[gambitking]

Okay, I was able to run a repair on the partition, just fixed those errors, still having problems moving wbfs files from the HD to the PC, and Wii Backup Manager isn't working well.

I will try the Copy function in wwt, thank you for your help.

 

[Maxternal]

wbfs2fat.py can convert the WBFS partition straight to a FAT32 partition with games and all in a matter of seconds
I'm not sure if those file system errors would cause any problems, though.

 

[gambitking]

Maxternal, your suggestion sounds like a magical miracle solution that might be exactly what I need. Having become frustrated with my situation, I went and did one more test transfer from HD to PC using Wii Backup Manager, and got quite a few errors in the log. The log is pasted below, if anyone can take a look and help me diagnose what the root of my problems might be:

18:23:26 Drive1ToDrive2Thread Thread started
18:23:27 WiiFatDrive.GetTempFilename Created folder D:\wbfs\Kirby's Epic Yarn [RK5E01]
18:23:27 WiiFatDrive.OpenVolume Created volume D:\wbfs\Kirby's Epic Yarn [RK5E01]\~3842.tmp
18:23:27 WBFSPartition.OpenFromHandle WBFS partition info
HDSectorSize = 512 Bytes
NumHDSectors = 18359296
NumWiiSectors = 286864
WBFSSectorSize = 2048 KB
NumWBFSSectors = 4482
WBFSSectorsPerDisc = 4482
DiscCount = 0
MaxDiscs = 215
FreeSpace = 8960 MB
UsedSpace = 4 MB
TotalSpace = 8964 MB
18:25:52 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 1 46332379136/0/2097152
21
The device is not ready
18:25:52 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:25:52 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read retry successful Attempt: 2
18:28:05 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 1 46454013952/0/2097152
1117
The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error
18:28:05 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 2 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 3 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 4 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 5 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 6 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 7 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 8 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 9 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read failed Attempt: 10 46454013952/0/2097152
2
The system cannot find the file specified
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.RefreshDriveHandle Handle refreshed \\.\F:
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.InternalReadSector3 Read retry count exceeded Aborted
18:31:39 WBFSPartition.AddDisc Read disc failed The operation completed successfully
18:31:39 Drive1ToDrive2Thread Transfer failed RK5E01 Kirby's Epic Yarn
18:31:39 Drive1ToDrive2Thread Average speed 13.03 MB/s
18:31:39 Drive1ToDrive2Thread Refreshing drive Drive (D
18:31:39 Drive1ToDrive2Thread Thread terminated

 

[PsyBlade]

since he needs the files on a different drive anyway wbfs2fat is not going to be helpful here

with WBM not working I think that there still is a problem
and with no clue about what that underlieing problem is even I have no idea what wbfs2fat would do to it
but I wouldn't recomend trying if he likes to keep the data

other simple things to try if copying with wwt falis are using a different usb cable or a different usb port

edit:
I don't know much about WBM but it sounds to me like it could be damaged sectors on the drive
does anyone know a tool that can run a filesystem ignorant nondestructive test
I would use "badblocks" but thats not available for windows afaik

 

[gambitking]

Actually, the reason I was moving the files to a different drive is the exact extra step that wbfs2fat would be cutting out for me - I only wanted to back up my games so I could reformat my external HDD to FAT32 and move them back.

EDIT: I have successfully run the wbfs2fat program on the HDD, so it's now in FAT32 , and at least I can rule out WBFS causing problems that I'm sure were contributing to the freeze-up issues, etc during gameplay.

But I tested a couple of transfers in WBM and they're still timing out and/or failing altogether. I'm stumped.

EDIT 2: Just realized that, now that I'm not enslaved to WBM because of the previous WBFS file system, I just used Windows to move games to my PC for backup, and it worked fine, no problems and much more quickly.

Thanks everyone for all the help, I'll just go with my setup for now