Hacking I think USB Helper has destroyed my SD Card, any way to restore it?

[edugr10]

Hey guys. I've been using Rednand for a few months, and Wii U USB Helper to transfer games. Never had any issues. Today I was copying a game to the SD card like I usually do (before I use WUP Installer to install from the SD into the Wii U). And I got this error halfway through the process. After that, my card has gone crazy. I can't format it properly, tried virtually every app out there. My PC can barely read it. Tried inserting it in the Wii U and loading the Rednand to see If I could still load a game, but all I get is a system error message. So I tried like crazy to format the card so I could start everything from scratch. I managed to somewhat format it, I guess, randomly. It's now looking like an EX-Fat card instead of FAT32. But it's still totally volatile and mostly inaccessible. My Rednand is still in there, invisibly occupying more than half the space (it's a 64GB card and has 28.8GB available space in it with zero files showing up, and my Wii U is the 32GB version).

My question is, is there anything I can do here to restore the card to its factory original state? Do I need to buy a new one? When I installed Rednand I dumped a backup of it. I have the slc, mlc and slccmpt files on my PC. If I buy a new card, is there a way to restore those backed up files and access all the games I have installed on my HDD again?

I really appreciate the help.

 

[Deleted User]

Card brand?
Also use guiformat to format your SDCard. [It forces it to format in most cases, if it's corrupted, it can give size 25mb out of 32gb for example]

Also redNAND is known for corrupting itself and very rarely, corrupting SDCard in process.
[Probably happens if you have cheap SDCard]

 

[edugr10]

Sandisk Ultra Class 10. Supposed to be good, right?

I tried guiformat, it's what I originally used to format it into FAT32. Got a variety of different errors, every time it's something different. Right now it's "the wrong volume is in the drive, please insert volume into drive X:

Tried again and I get "this drive is too small for FAT32, there must be at least 64k clusters".

Tried again, this time allocating 64k clusters instead of 32k, and I get the same error above.

I have tried changing driver letters too, because maybe there's a problem with the current one. Doesn't help. Of course when I do this I make sure I'm trying to format the new letter.

 

[Deleted User]

Try this? SDCard Formatter

 

[KHANV1CT]

Use this tool. It will completely format the card including the hidden rednand partition.

 

[edugr10]

Tried SD Formatter too, it says "the drive is write-protected". I even tried switching the small switch on the side of the card, and creating Windows registries to make sure nothing is write-protected. Didn't work.

That is one of the errors I get from SD Formatter. The other one is "could not format the card, either drive or card is not supported by this software".

That app I didn't try yet, KHANV1CT, will try now and report back soon.

Update:

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

That app I didn't try yet, KHANV1CT, will try now and report back soon.

Error: "Device media is write-protected".

Tried both FAT32 and NTFS. Damn, what the hell happened to this card?

 

[KHANV1CT]

Just died maybe. These things happen, especially when you constantly write a bunch of data to it.

 

[edugr10]

It's no biggie if I can just buy a new card, inject my backed up Rednand files (or copy it all over again from scratch from the Wii U itself?) and be able to access all the games I already have on my external HDD. Is that possible? I have virtually every game I want to play in there. The game I was transfering when hell broke loose was effin' Just Dance 2016. I don't care about it at all. I don't think I even need to use USB Helper ever again. I just want to be able to boot Rednand again from the SD card.

 

[Deleted User]

Just use plain sysNAND unless you want another SDCard to shit itself due to BotW doing heavy r/w.

 

[edugr10]

Just use plain sysNAND unless you want another SDCard to shit itself due to BotW doing heavy r/w.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? I'm a complete layman on Wii U hacking. Is the Sysnand the regular nand that boots up first before I go into loadiine.oh to load the Rednand?

I have a buddy who helped me with the hack and he said it's recommended to always play from the Rednand to avoid bricking the regular nand. is that true?

Also, do games like Zelda read and write on the SD even though the game is being played from a USB drive?

Thanks for the help and sorry if these are dumb questions.

 

[Deleted User]

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? I'm a complete layman on Wii U hacking. Is the Sysnand the regular nand that boots up first before I go into loadiine.oh to load the Rednand?

I have a buddy who helped me with the hack and he said it's recommended to always play from the Rednand to avoid bricking the regular nand. is that true?

Also, do games like Zelda read and write on the SD even though the game is being played from a USB drive?

Thanks for the help and sorry if these are dumb questions.

The system itself [In this case redNAND] does alot of stuff in background so.
No, you can't brick sysNAND unless you can't follow a simple guide.

sysNAND is stock FW which is always booted at start.
We have better hacks like ColdbootHaxChi and Haxchi. They both have CFW but CBHC provides patching straight on-boot.
[If you want to know more, then i suggest checking Kafluke's Noob Guide or my redNAND-free guide]

They're way better than redNAND and don't corrupt everything they can.

 

[datahoarder]

I wouldn't say USB Helper destroyed your SD card as much as I would say your card probably just died while using USB Helper.

 

[AdmiralSpeedy]

Wouldn't that card have already been exFAT and not FAT32, since it's larger than 32GB? Or did you force it with a tool.

Either way it sounds like it just died. I've had many SD cards just fail over time in various devices. Honestly it's the one storage type I've had fail the most and I've never owned anything but brand name high class cards.

 

[ganons]

Fake card?

 

[Deleted User]

Fake card?

Fake cards usually are only faked to show 32Gb->365GB which in reality, are only 2GB.
This wasn't the case for @OP

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Just use plain sysNAND unless you want another SDCard to shit itself due to BotW doing heavy r/w.

So it's better that the sysNAND wears out instead?

 

[Deleted User]

So it's better that the sysNAND wears out instead?

Probably. If you ever manage to get it to that state, then sure lol.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Probably. If you ever manage to get it to that state, then sure lol.

It's flash memory, just like a SD card. It's not impervious to wear. But realistically it takes a lot of write cycles in either case unless you get a bad batch.

 

[edugr10]

The system itself [In this case redNAND] does alot of stuff in background so.
No, you can't brick sysNAND unless you can't follow a simple guide.

sysNAND is stock FW which is always booted at start.
We have better hacks like ColdbootHaxChi and Haxchi. They both have CFW but CBHC provides patching straight on-boot.
[If you want to know more, then i suggest checking Kafluke's Noob Guide or my redNAND-free guide]

They're way better than redNAND and don't corrupt everything they can.

My biggest concern is the games + updates + DLC I have currently sitting on my HDD. Can I access all of that with those methods you mentioned? I don't know if I have the energy to download and install over 500GB across 300 titles all over again.

 

[AdmiralSpeedy]

My biggest concern is the games + updates + DLC I have currently sitting on my HDD. Can I access all of that with those methods you mentioned? I don't know if I have the energy to download and install over 500GB across 300 titles all over again.

Lol, so don't do that again. Install the games you actually play.