Hacking How do you delete games off the USB Loader?

[moviecouple]

I keep hearing that your USB HDD will get screwed up if you delete games off the hard drive when using WBFS?

What about if you delete them through the actual USB Loader from the Wii?

 

[mestapho]

Right now it looks like you shouldn't delete games at all. It has to do with WBFS.

Basically it looks like when you delete off of this file system it just leaves a "blank spot"

on the hdd or flash mem. When you add a game/iso it will just write to that "blank spot"

whether the new iso will fit or not thus corrupting the data around the "blank spot".

Someone in another thread made a good visual representation of it. I'll see if I can copy/paste

it here.

 

[mestapho]

Ext2 would be preferred because we definitely don't need any journaling capabilities if we're not constantly writing to the disk.

With a quick look at the source code, it seems that WBFS does NOT fragment its files, so there is no need for a defragger. It does this on purpose, because the data for the file needs to be contiguous when loading it. Possibly, there is a need for a compactor, though. (Smush all files together to eliminate gaps of free space.) But the problem is that keeping contiguous files can result in wasted space:

In this case, a user has 4 files on his hard drive. He deletes file B. Then he adds file E. Space is wasted (unless he adds a file that can fill that space, but this is never a guarantee).

Regarding corruption of games, maybe there's a problem checking free space, which would cause this problem: Just a wild guess.

I don't feel like looking into the source in depth right now, because it's 3 am here; goodnight!

I think this makes it easier to understand.

 

[moviecouple]

What about re-formatting the hard drive and adding games all over again?

 

[mestapho]

That looks to be the only way right now.

Bummer if you have a ton of games ripped from the wii.

 

[maduin]

we just need a way to defragment the WBFS partition