Hacking Lost over 200GB of games on WiiU ext HDD

[RobbieTheELK]

Been asking around and no one had given me the slightest clue. I have a 1 TB ext HDD attached to my WiiU with ext power.
Spent weeks and weeks loading games from WiiU USB Helper to the HDD and been playing Zelda daily. Yesterday I powered my WiiU only to find blank Tiles everywhere, the HDD is fine as its on.

* Checked HDD under Data Management and it seems formatted with 980GB free.
* Tried installing a small game from USB Helper to check the drive is ok and its fine.

Here are my own personal possibilities of the issue:

* HDD got corrupt? Possible but very low chance as its fine running newly installed games.

* Nintedo detected fake tickets and wiped it given its connected to the internet? Low likelihood

* Small son turned on the Wiiu, went into settings > Scrolled to Data Management > Format > USB HDD > Yes? Low given he only knows how to launch games from tile menu.

 

[Bladexdsl]

is it a seagate hdd?

 

[RobbieTheELK]

is it a seagate hdd?

Yes, Seagate (FreeAgent) External USB 1TB!

Its an old one, about 5 yrs old but never used it much before...

 

[Bladexdsl]

knew it
there's your problem don't buy seagate. i've had sg hdd die just by sitting on a shelf doing nothing not even used. they are absolute garbage cheap ass HDD.

 

[RobbieTheELK]

knew it
there's your problem don't buy seagate. i've had sg hdd die just by sitting on a shelf doing nothing not even used. they are absolute garbage cheap ass HDD.

F&$*$ F#**# i lost WEEKS of work copying games to SD then installing..ive stupidly went back to reinstalling everything on it again. Shall i get another hdd and do a copy via WiiU?

 

[Clydefrosch]

knew it
there's your problem don't buy seagate. i've had sg hdd die just by sitting on a shelf doing nothing not even used. they are absolute garbage cheap ass HDD.

thats generally an issue with external hdds.
failure rates over the first year are scarily high, for all of them. something to do with the controller chips breaking easily, not really much help for the average consumer, but since the disks are usually fine, the data can be rescued by an expert mosto f the time.
if it survives the first year of regular use, it's usually a keeper.


just out of interest, have you tried one of these disk saving utilities to check if they find anything on it?

 

[RobbieTheELK]

just out of interest, have you tried one of these disk saving utilities to check if they find anything on it?

Nope given its formatted in Nintendo language, I didn't think anything can read it. Ive already spent all day today reloading 32GB of games at a time on the same HDD

 

[bob4455]

Is it possible to make a copy of your games USB to a new USB using the computer?

 

[EmulateLife]

Is it possible to make a copy of your games USB to a new USB using the computer?

No it's not. But you can on the Wii U in data management.

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

just out of interest, have you tried one of these disk saving utilities to check if they find anything on it?

A Wii U formatted hard drive cannot be read by anything but a Wii U. If you plug it in a PC it'll force you to format.

 

[Sakitoshi]

knew it
there's your problem don't buy seagate. i've had sg hdd die just by sitting on a shelf doing nothing not even used. they are absolute garbage cheap ass HDD.

happy seagate user here.
have 3 external 2tb 2.5inch hdd's that work like a charm, 2 of those are connected 24/7 on a "server" notebook torrenting animes and running plex.
the other one gets normal use but is mostly there doing nothing.
my ps2 also has a pretty old seagate 200gb ide drive and is still working no problem.

I've seen more western digital drives die than seagate, even back then with a 500mb (yes, megabytes) drive dying after a few days of use and now with a large amount of wd external drives dying on the hands of users in my old job.

for the look of it is more probable that the wii u corrupted the partition table or index or whatever the wii u uses, because he states that the drive works like normal.

 

[Cylent1]

I realy don't think Nintendo did anything as I went through this too.
I lost 600gb of games from my Ext HDD while it was connected to my PC.
I am thinking the file system just gets corrupted pretty easily and thats an unfortunate reality.

 

[EmulateLife]

I realy don't think Nintendo did anything as I went through this too.
I lost 600gb of games from my Ext HDD while it was connected to my PC.
I am thinking the file system just gets corrupted pretty easily and thats an unfortunate reality.

What? You lost those games because you connected it to the PC. You can't connect a Wii U hard drive to a PC without it making you format. The Wii U has it's own format not readable by a PC.

 

[Cylent1]

What? You lost those games because you connected it to the PC. You can't connect a Wii U hard drive to a PC without it making you format. The Wii U has it's own format not readable by a PC.

Thats probably what happened then to me... I must of probably, most likely hit the format button not realizing.
I started with a patritioned hdd thinking it would work on the WiiU but it didn't, so I went and took all my games off the hdd to repartition it, and they were all gone.
My hdd still works to this day.

 

[Deleted User]

F&$*$ F#**# i lost WEEKS of work copying games to SD then installing..ive stupidly went back to reinstalling everything on it again. Shall i get another hdd and do a copy via WiiU?

get a kesu hdd i have a 120gb but you can also get a 1tb so fat it has lasted 1 year with me. hp drives also work.