Hacking I Can't Get My HDD To Play Homebrew

[dsfanatic5]

I spent hours searching for the answer last night, and I couldn't figure this out. I just got my Seagate Freeagent Go 500gb, and I'm testing it out. I made two primary partitions, the first is 50gb FAT32 (volume label: Wii Files, drive M that I plan on using for Homebrew. The second partition (volume label: WBFS drive N is 415gb, converted to WBFS from FAT32, and works flawlessly with Ultimate USB Loader.

So I know my HDD works with the usb loaders, and GEEXBOX recognizes the folders from the 50gb partition (I even watched a video). But every time I load an emulator, in about 20 seconds the light on my HDD fades to black. The moment I exit back to the Homebrew Channel, the light comes on. However, if I try to boot up USB Loader after trying the emulator, then the loader won't recognize my drive at all, and I have to power off/on the system.

Could it just be that my drive won't play non-Linux homebrew, or is there something I failed to do? I'd imagine it should be easy as selecting "load from USB" in the emulator settings, and browsing to the appropriate folder. Looking at the compatibility wiki for usb devices, it looks like most people never bothered to test with homebrew. I'm getting ready to just make my drive one partition for wbfs, but before I do, I wanted some feedback. I'd really like the extra space on my HDD for when the N64, NeoGeo, and MAME emulators take off. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[wiistarter]

Does it have a power down function??? or a sleep mode

 

[foobar]

I'm guessing it's a sleep issue. Lots of usb hard drives will power down to conserve energy, reduce heat, and prevent a possible head crash if the drive gets moved or knocked over.

For whatever reason, the drive won't get woken up on next access; my guesses as to why run from:

• The cios USB 2.0 mass storage device implementation forgot to include code to do this automatically
• The homebrew application would have to check and wake the drive itself, and currently none of them do
• The homebrew application has no way of knowing if the drive needs waking up

The fix is to go to seagate's website and hunt down the software to configure your drive. There should be something there to disable the drive automatically spinning down and going to sleep when idle. Hope this helps.

Edit: formatting

 

[dsfanatic5]

I'm guessing it's a sleep issue. Lots of usb hard drives will power down to conserve energy, reduce heat, and prevent a possible head crash if the drive gets moved or knocked over.

For whatever reason, the drive won't get woken up on next access; my guesses as to why run from:

• The cios USB 2.0 mass storage device implementation forgot to include code to do this automatically
• The homebrew application would have to check and wake the drive itself, and currently none of them do
• The homebrew application has no way of knowing if the drive needs waking up

The fix is to go to seagate's website and hunt down the software to configure your drive. There should be something there to disable the drive automatically spinning down and going to sleep when idle. Hope this helps.

Edit: formatting

The very first thing I did was use Seagate Manager to set the standby to NEVER. My drive passes the Mario Kart test, and has no issues with spindown whatsoever. I've tried using the newer versions of fceugx and snes9x (with GUI), and older versions, but my USB drive becomes inactive once I start the emulator. The moment I exit to Homebrew channel, the drive becomes active again. I know people use their HDD with some of the emulators, so it might just be an incompatibility with the Seagate drive. I get the feeling that most people don't bother using the HDD to store their games, since the compatibility wiki shows "Not Tested" in the homebrew section for the majority of the entries. I think I'm just going to use the full 465gb for wbfs, even though I'll probably never fill the whole thing. I have about 3gb left on my 16gb sdhc card, which should be enough for future emulators. I might just opt for a 32gb when they come down in price, and stick to the sd card for the emulators.

Thanks for responding.

 

[thc42O]

i have the exact same drive i partitioned it 250 for WBFS and 250 for a Fat32 partition for loading up avi's in geexbox.
if u use the GUI USBLoader (which i highly recomend) Or any other one with a 30 sec wait retry it makes it alot easier to fix the "no wbfs partition recognized" because u just unplug while in the loader and plug in and it detects it instantly. I am hoping that more compatibility for our seagates comes with ciosrev11 who knows.

best of luck brother