Hacking Is it possible to recover my USB?

[darkphoenix16]

Hi there

Not sure what happened, but I woke up one day and my Wii U was completely formatted. I had to resync the gamepad and everything.

This is an unmodified console - the most I did was load some games via loadiine. No permanent changes to the Wii U.

I had a bunch of time sunk into various games - all that appears to be gone. Also, all the apps I had purchased (along with some backed up save games) that were on a USB thumbstick are gone. The Wii U cannot read the stick

The stick still works fine, its not dead from read/write.

Does the Wii U encrypt the USB device using a randomly generated key or something? That is the only explanation I can think of for this scenario.

If the answer is yes to the above, it is possible to break this encryption using some sort of homebrew? Would love to be able to retrieve all this data.

Thanks so much for reading.

 

[Ryccardo]

Does the Wii U encrypt the USB device using a randomly generated key or something? That is the only explanation I can think of for this scenario.

Correct. Part of the key comes from eeprom (so it's console specific and is changed on factory resets), another part is tied to the disk (both the "controller, platters, motor, heads" part and the sata<>usb converter)

If the answer is yes to the above, it is possible to break this encryption using some sort of homebrew? Would love to be able to retrieve all this data.

Break? Not really...
If you had backed up your eeprom (with the dedicated homebrew, or creating a rednand with Mocha and eeprom emulation enabled) + some software that doesn't exist but can reasonably be made in a couple of days, then yes it would be possible....