Hacking Nintendont

[pedro702]

Unless I'm mistaken FAT32 has both a 4GB maximum filesize limit, and a 4TB maximum partition limit. Sure it's possible to get round both of these with some work, but why when NTFS doesn't have these issues? USBLGX supports NTFS, so it must be possible I guess?

2tb is more than enough for everything wii related... gc games isos are 1.35gb so you got more than enough for like 5 collections lol.

no one will use anything bigger than even 2tb on a wii or wiiu lol

 

[ccfman2004]

FAT32 has a 2TB partition limit.

 

[fandango]

4tb is more than enough for everything wii related... gc games isos are 1.35gb so you got more than enough for like 5 collections lol.
no one will use anything bigger than even 2tb on a wii or wiiu lol

Thta's only true if all you have is GC games on your disk. For those of us with complete collections of GC, Wii and PS1 games, then 2TB isnt enough. I currently have almost 4TB.

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FAT32 has a 2TB partition limit.

Sorry my mistake, it's not 4TB, it's 2TB. There are workarounds, but they are a pain.

I guess the thing is; if someone says "it's technically difficult for Nintendont to support NTFS", then I say "OK fine". But if someone says "No one needs NTFS", then I say "that's not true because NTFS would have some useful benefits over FAT32".

 

[pedro702]

Thta's only trues if all you have is GC games on your disk. For those of us with complete collections of GC, Wii and PX1 games, then 2TB isnt enough.

ps1 emulation on wii is like 50-50 carrying around complete collections on wii for ps1 seems a waste of time, the ps1 emulator hasnt been updated in forever and i doubt it will be ever again so the games that dont work dont work so you can just take away most ps1 isos lol

i dont pity anyone who carries complete collections tbh, they will never play 99% of the games in there... also sd card slot is a thing, just buy a big sd card and you can put the entire gc collection there if you want that, i still see no reason to carrie games that you will never even start ever.

 

[ber71]

NTFS, on the wii, suffers from the same problem, 2TB max size. Anything beyond 2TB is unreadable for the wii, because it can address 2exp32 sectors only, which happens to be 2TB (with the usual sectors of 512bytes) no matter what type of filesystem is on top.
The only way to read past the 2 TB mark is use a HDD with a logical sector size of 4k. Then, you can have a large NTFS partition, but you can use a large fat32 partition too so nothing to win from the NTFS side.

 

[ccfman2004]

NTFS, on the wii, suffers from the same problem, 2TB max size. Anything beyond 2TB is unreadable for the wii, because it can address 2exp32 sectors only, which happens to be 2TB (with the usual sectors of 512bytes) no matter what type of filesystem is on top.
The only way to read past the 2 TB mark is use a HDD with a logical sector size of 4k. Then, you can have a large NTFS partition, but you can use a large fat32 partition too so nothing to win from the NTFS side.

The limitation is the MBR Partition type. GUID doesn’t have this issue.

 

[ca032769]

Unless I'm mistaken FAT32 has both a 4GB maximum filesize limit, and a 4TB maximum partition limit. Sure it's possible to get round both of these with some work, but why when NTFS doesn't have these issues? USBLGX supports NTFS, so it must be possible I guess?

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OK fair point.

Yes Wii Backup Manager handles the splitting of files over 4GB and you can work around the 4TB partition limit. I've used 6, 8, 10 & 12TB drives formatted to FAT32 as a single partition for years. But in reality a 5TB drive will fit all the NTSC Wii & GameCube's titles plus the miscellaneous PAL and JPN not released in NTSC format.

The trick is to be able to get your drive from GPT to MBR and that's not easy for most newer larger drives. However I have had great success with Western Digital drives. Instructions on how to do so can be found in my signature. I do plan to stop being lazy and redo the instructions for just just the 5TB. Plus I need to take some time to finish divorcing my 2nd wife so I can eventually move onto #3, which I am told will treat me better.

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2tb is more than enough for everything wii related... gc games isos are 1.35gb so you got more than enough for like 5 collections lol.

no one will use anything bigger than even 2tb on a wii or wiiu lol

Actually that is not entirely accurate.

To have it all (and I almost do) NTSC Wii, GameCube's, PAL/JPN not released in NTSC a 5TB drive is needed. Plus there are a few games released with a few versions. My Wii's are in .wbfs format (compressed) and GameCube's as full ISO.

All on one 5TB single partition FAT32 formatted drive. As posted a few messages back I actually took it up to a 12TB drive and had it all working as a single partition, but in the end it was overkill so I never tried it on any of my 18TBs.

 

[pedro702]

Yes Wii Backup Manager handles the splitting of files over 4GB and you can work around the 4TB partition limit. I've used 6, 8, 10 & 12TB drives formatted to FAT32 as a single partition for years. But in reality a 5TB drive will fit all the NTSC Wii & GameCube's titles plus the miscellaneous PAL and JPN not released in NTSC format.

The trick is to be able to get your drive from GPT to MBR and that's not easy for most newer larger drives. However I have had great success with Western Digital drives. Instructions on how to do so can be found in my signature. I do plan to stop being lazy and redo the instructions for just just the 5TB. Plus need to finish divorcing my 2nd wife so I can eventually move onto #3, which I am told will treat me better.

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Actually that is not entirely accurate.

To have it all (and I almost do) NTSC Wii, GameCube's, PAL/JPN not released in NTSC a 5TB drive is needed. Plus there are a few games released with a few versions. My Wii's are in .wbfs format (compressed) and CG's as full ISO.

All on one 5TB single partition FAT32 formatted drive.

no one needs entire wii collections when 90% of them are shoverlware that will never be played anyway lol.

 

[ccfman2004]

My Wii's are in .wbfs format (compressed) and CG's as full ISO.

All on one 5TB single partition FAT32 formatted drive.

I assume you mean GC and not CG.

 

[ca032769]

ps1 emulation on wii is like 50-50 carrying around complete collections on wii for ps1 seems a waste of time, the ps1 emulator hasnt been updated in forever and i doubt it will be ever again so the games that dont work dont work so you can just take away most ps1 isos lol

i dont pity anyone who carries complete collections tbh, they will never play 99% of the games in there... also sd card slot is a thing, just buy a big sd card and you can put the entire gc collection there if you want that, i still see no reason to carrie games that you will never even start ever.

Yes you are 100% correct.

I play maybe 10 to 15 of the games which I do keep on my 256GB SDXC card for when the external HDD is not hooked up or I don't feel like plugging it in, which is most of the time. But the drive is there incase I want anything not already on the SD card.

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I assume you mean GC and not CG.

Thank you, edited above to correct that.

EDIT: Edited to add pictures to prove I am an addict and have a problem. First step in recovery right?

 

[ber71]

The limitation is the MBR Partition type. GUID doesn’t have this issue.

MBR has a 2TB limit too, but it is for the same reason, 32bit addressing and a sector size of 512 bytes. With 4k sectors, the 2 TB limit can be raised up to 16TB, for both MBR and fat32. And NTFS too (which wouldn't be readable past 2TB with 512b sectors).

Nintendont, ULGX and WFL can perfectly use GPT instead of MBR, but the very same 32bit addressing applies, so anything can't be read past 2TB unless 4k sectors.

 

[ca032769]

MBR has a 2TB limit too, but it is for the same reason, 32bit addressing and a sector size of 512 bytes. With 4k sectors, the 2 TB limit can be raised up to 16TB, for both MBR and fat32. And NTFS too (which wouldn't be readable past 2TB with 512b sectors).

Nintendont, ULGX and WFL can perfectly use GPT instead of MBR, but the very same 32bit addressing applies, so anything can't be read past 2TB unless 4k sectors.

Oddly enough you just have to adjust the cluster size. I'd have to go back and read my own posts to see what they are for the different size drives, but for my 5TB FAT32 I'm using 64k cluster size to get the entire drive usable. Everything works just fine with the larger cluster size.

However you are correct, if I were only using 32k clusters I would not have use of the entire 5TB as a single partition.

EDIT: Ok, I went to the way back machine and you can use the 32k clusters up to 4TB, but you must use the proper formatting tool FAT32 GUI Formatter. For 5TB to 8TB use 64k clusters & for a 10TB to 12TB use 256k clusters.

 

[ber71]

It isn't related to cluster size, that only matters for file layout. It is all about sector size.
From Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The FAT32 boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting the maximal FAT32 volume size to 2 terabytes with a sector size of 512 bytes. The maximum FAT32 volume size is 16 TB with a sector size of 4,096 bytes.

If your fat32 volume is larger than 2TB, it's because your disk uses 4k sectors.

 

[ca032769]

It isn't related to cluster size, that only matters for file layout. It is all about sector size.
From Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The FAT32 boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting the maximal FAT32 volume size to 2 terabytes with a sector size of 512 bytes. The maximum FAT32 volume size is 16 TB with a sector size of 4,096 bytes.

If your fat32 volume is larger than 2TB, it's because your disk uses 4k sectors.

Yes, it's hard to remember everything that was going on 5 years ago when I first did this.

However, cluster size does come into play the larger the drive gets to be able to use and see it all.

Partition type - Sector size - Cluster size, I'm not claiming to understand it at all. I think there was something about the 4k sectors because I think that is what changes when the Western Digital drive is changed from GPT to MBR. My only point to the conversation is that a larger than 2TB single FAT32 partition is pretty easy to make for the Wii if you use the right drive and format it properly. Say I see I have some partition/sector information pictures posted at the bottom of my 5 year old posting. Maybe it is meaningful to you with what you're talking about: https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-loader-gx.149922/page-1129#post-6662953

 

[ccfman2004]

MBR has a 2TB limit too, but it is for the same reason, 32bit addressing and a sector size of 512 bytes. With 4k sectors, the 2 TB limit can be raised up to 16TB, for both MBR and fat32. And NTFS too (which wouldn't be readable past 2TB with 512b sectors).

Nintendont, ULGX and WFL can perfectly use GPT instead of MBR, but the very same 32bit addressing applies, so anything can't be read past 2TB unless 4k sectors.

I forgot that someone added GPT support a while back.

 

[fandango]

When I last bought a 4TB Western Digital drive it was 4096 sectors and pre-formatted with NTFS.

So I had to use the old WDQuickFormatter.exe tool on a Windows VM (I'm using Ubuntu) to change the partition table from GPT to MBR. Then I used guiformat-x64.exe in my Windows VM to format it as FAT32 with a 32k cluster size. It wasn't an easy process I have to say, and I'm not entirely sure that I did it the right way, but it seemed to work.

If Nintendont supported NTFS then I guess I could have simply just used the pre-formatted drive without all this fuss!

 

[Extrems]

Little known fact: Nintendont supports exFAT and is the only Wii application to do so.

 

[ca032769]

When I last bought a 4TB Western Digital drive it was 4096 sectors and pre-formatted with NTFS.

So I had to use the old WDQuickFormatter.exe tool on a Windows VM (I'm using Ubuntu) to change the partition table from GPT to MBR. Then I used guiformat-x64.exe in my Windows VM to format it as FAT32 with a 32k cluster size. It wasn't an easy process I have to say, and I'm not entirely sure that I did it the right way, but it seemed to work.

If Nintendont supported NTFS then I guess I could have simply just used the pre-formatted drive without all this fuss!

There are reasons NTFS is not used. Yes it would be nice to just leave it as NTFS, maybe some day, but there are obvious reasons that a NTFS drive becomes problematic.

Keep in mind almost no other Homebrew programs support NTFS. Unless EVERYTHING gets rewritten, having an NTFS drive right now for use with one loader has its limitations.

 

[fandango]

Keep in mind almost no other Homebrew programs support NTFS.

That's not true as USB Loader GX supports NTFS.

Unless EVERYTHING gets rewritten, having an NTFS drive right now for use with one loader has its limitations.

But the only homebrew I use with my USB drive are ULGX and Nintendont. The majority of my homebrew is on SD card and wouldn't need to be rewritten.

But if you don't want to do it that's up to you. I'm just making a suggestion.

 

[ca032769]

That's not true as USB Loader GX supports NTFS.

But the only homebrew I use with my USB drive are ULGX and Nintendont. The majority of my homebrew is on SD card and wouldn't need to be rewritten.

But if you don't want to do it that's up to you. I'm just making a suggestion.

Ya, it does depend on how you use your system as to what will work for you.

Bouncing around all the loaders like I do, an NTFS setup would not work. Plus I'm old school and love my CFG USB Loader which will never get another update. At least Wii Flow has Wii Flow Lite that's provided fairly recent modifications.

I'm always open to whoever gets NTFS working as a viable solution. It's always good to have choices.