Hacking Is my Wii backup-friendly?

[VirusHunter]

First of all, I'm sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum.

I bought a new Wii yesterday and I attempted to softmod it. But then after doing some research I found out about the D3-2 drive that new Wiis have and I was flipping out (Because I wanted to play some backups)
So I put my serial number through the Wii Drive Chip Database and I get this...

Serial number: LU122238640
* There is a 50% chance the chipset is GC2-D4 on a smaller drive board.
* And there is also a 25% chance the chipset is GC2-D2E.
* Lastly, a 25% chance the chipset is GC2-DMS.

So now I'm relieved to not see the D3-2 drive anywhere but I don't know if any of these drives are backup-friendly. I've been struggling to get backup games to play on it (NeoGamma gives me a "unknown drive report 20081218" and GC Backup Launcher just gives me a green screen flash and resets my Wii)

I have 4.2U firmware and I followed this guide: http://www.wiihacks.com/recommended-faqs-g...any-4-2-wii.htm

I'm not at home right now so I can't give the specific details on what cIOS my Wii has but I'm pretty sure it's IOS35 or IOS36.

I've been thinking about re-moding it with the softmod guide on the GBATemp forums...what do you guys think?

 

[gameboy13]

Some new Wiis cannot play backups via softmod. I would suggest getting an up-to-date modchip or a USB hard drive.

 

[Riley]

Get a usb drive and use CFG-loader.
Install the forwarder channel for easy access.

 

[neotank19]

I was dissapointed at first to learn my wii could not read dvd backups, so I went with the hard drive backup option. I can say I could not be more pleased with how it works.

 

[WiiPower]

On christmas you had about a 50:50 chance that a white Wii could read backups, now i would say the chance is about 10% that a white Wii you buy today can read backups.

And i got reports that the drive date 20080714 is already non backup compatible, so i'm >90% sure, your Wii can't read backups. If you tell me that you have a cIOS and you are using DVD+Rs with correct bitsetting or DVD-Rs, then i'm 99% sure.

 

[VirusHunter]

Thanks guys, I really appreciate the help.
I guess I'll go get me a hard drive on my way home today...500GB should be more than enough!

 

[Riley]

Format the drive to FAT32
Use Wii Game Manager to convert your .iso files to .wbfs files.
put your .wbfs in USB:/wbfs/GAMEID.wbfs

Now you can put wii games along with all your other files on there. You wont need 500GB for wii games.

 

[TRushInfo]

some advice, dont buy WD passports because they have 660mb smartware that you cant get rid of. it makes a virtual cd come up every time it is plugged in, you can disable the vcd, but theres currently no waqy to regain the 660mbs, so fuck WD and buy from a company that will sell you a 500gb HD that REALLY has 500gb. i think thats ridiculous, would you buy a car that claims 6 cylinders and when you get it home you can only use 5 of them? the

 

[WiiPower]

some advice, dont buy WD passports because they have 660mb smartware that you cant get rid of. it makes a virtual cd come up every time it is plugged in, you can disable the vcd, but theres currently no waqy to regain the 660mbs, so fuck WD and buy from a company that will sell you a 500gb HD that REALLY has 500gb. i think thats ridiculous, would you buy a car that claims 6 cylinders and when you get it home you can only use 5 of them? the

You can't buy 500 GB HDDs with 500 GB, you always get about 465 GB instead. And try to repartition the HDD with linux, it did wonders to my notebook HDD with some crappy 4 GB recovery HDD i couldn't get rid of using windows.

 

[mayu29]

It's true, the new WD hard disks have vcd content on them and you can't get rid of that, that's why I bought a Seagate Free Agent Go which works brilliant with all type of cIOS'es.

 

[75UR15]

Both of my "My Passport" Wd drives work very well, total size around 465g (499G when doing 1000 b to kb) Generally size loss is around 8% (part for partitioning table, which is next to 0 in size, part due to the cheating way of advertising it as 1000 bytes to a kilobyte, instead of 1024), and in my past history of drives I have noticed usually wd is larger either way. I had 2 WD 250gb drives (my xboxs), and one 250g seagate drive, the seagate drive had around 7-10 g less of space.

 

[bwillb]

some advice, dont buy WD passports because they have 660mb smartware that you cant get rid of. it makes a virtual cd come up every time it is plugged in, you can disable the vcd, but theres currently no waqy to regain the 660mbs, so fuck WD and buy from a company that will sell you a 500gb HD that REALLY has 500gb. i think thats ridiculous, would you buy a car that claims 6 cylinders and when you get it home you can only use 5 of them? the

ehh not going to fret over half a gig on a 500gb drive.... buy according to what is least likely to die on you. from my research so far, that looks like WD

 

[Supercool330]

Get one of the new hybrid drives that have like 4 gigs or so of solid state memory. That way it can load the entire game into the SSD and you wont get any of the odd graphics or sound problems you see with slower drives (none of which are show stopping, but they are irritating).

Example http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148591

 

[pepxl]

Get one of the new hybrid drives that have like 4 gigs or so of solid state memory. That way it can load the entire game into the SSD and you wont get any of the odd graphics or sound problems you see with slower drives (none of which are show stopping, but they are irritating).

Example http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148591

makes no difference using a SSD or HDD simply because the wii isnt a PC, data transfer from HDD/disk to wii isnt a constant data steam, the data is only accessed when needed, hence why some HDDs go to sleep because they arent in use and some games crash when certain HDDs wake up

 

[TRushInfo]

some advice, dont buy WD passports because they have 660mb smartware that you cant get rid of. it makes a virtual cd come up every time it is plugged in, you can disable the vcd, but theres currently no waqy to regain the 660mbs, so fuck WD and buy from a company that will sell you a 500gb HD that REALLY has 500gb. i think thats ridiculous, would you buy a car that claims 6 cylinders and when you get it home you can only use 5 of them? the

You can't buy 500 GB HDDs with 500 GB, you always get about 465 GB instead. And try to repartition the HDD with linux, it did wonders to my notebook HDD with some crappy 4 GB recovery HDD i couldn't get rid of using windows.

yes i know that. this is smartware and its undeletable, it has firmware on the ide to usb controller that marks it as unmoveable, tried on linux as well

 

[Supercool330]

makes no difference using a SSD or HDD simply because the wii isnt a PC, data transfer from HDD/disk to wii isnt a constant data steam, the data is only accessed when needed, hence why some HDDs go to sleep because they arent in use and some games crash when certain HDDs wake up

Umm, that's not at all how drive latency works. Wii requests a read of a given address from drive, if it reads from physical platter, the drive head has to move to the correct track, reads a cluster (or more) into the drive cache and sends it to main memory. With SSD, there is no physical movement and thus much less delay between request and response (latency). Thus the IO queue doesn't get as backed up so things are able to load at proper speeds. This is most noticeable in decreasing load times and fixing sync issues between audio (music) and game-play. For example, Mario Kart does some weird music caching stuff that can cause the audio to cut out on slower drives.

P.S. Computers are far from constant data streams as well. Unless your box sucks really hard you should be doing almost everything from ram and only hitting your HDD a few times each second.