Hacking Playing from USB or HD? My take on WiiFlow vs USBLoader GX, and my missing partition tables

[Night_Lion]

I am brand new to modding my Wii. My Wii has been shoved in a closet for the last 8 years and I decided to bring it back so i can play games with my daughter.

I am super technical, so that isn't an issue here. I hacked the device, did the usual bootmii and regular mod installs, etc.
For my external device, I first started with a 128gb USB card (amazon has them on sale right now for $19) formatted for Fat32.

Picked up a 64gb USB3 flash drive. Fat32. Split and copied the games with Wii Backup Manager for windows. No issues.

I went with WiiFlow to play off of USB. WiiFlow is sllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwww. I have no idea what it is doing, but it is like Wiiflow has to verify the ENTIRE image before starting the game. I had something small like Mario baseball take 6 minutes to load. That's insane.
Tried a bunch of mods/settings changes, no dice. Uninstalled Wiiflow and went with USBLoader GX.

LOVE GX!!! Games play instantly.

Now that i have that working, i tried installing the forwarder so i could have GX as a channel.

I'm not sure what I did here, but all of a sudden, the files are missing from my USB drive. USBLoader can see that 40gb of space is in use, but no files. Has this ever happened to any of you?

I am going to try formatting the drive for NTFS and try again. But the thing that is occurring to me is most USB keys are not meant for heavy read-write operations. The drives that are designed for heavy read/write that can run Windows are not cheap.. Has anyone had success with using a USB key for their drive storage? Should i just get an external HD?

I'm also trying to figure out if somehow during the forwarder or gx process i may have wiped the data, but i don't see how.

Any feedback or guidance would be much apprecaited.

Thanks!

 

[Shadow#1]

I am brand new to modding my Wii. My Wii has been shoved in a closet for the last 8 years and I decided to bring it back so i can play games with my daughter.

I am super technical, so that isn't an issue here. I hacked the device, did the usual bootmii and regular mod installs, etc.
For my external device, I first started with a 128gb USB card (amazon has them on sale right now for $19) formatted for Fat32.

Picked up a 64gb USB3 flash drive. Fat32. Split and copied the games with Wii Backup Manager for windows. No issues.

I went with WiiFlow to play off of USB. WiiFlow is sllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwww. I have no idea what it is doing, but it is like Wiiflow has to verify the ENTIRE image before starting the game. I had something small like Mario baseball take 6 minutes to load. That's insane.
Tried a bunch of mods/settings changes, no dice. Uninstalled Wiiflow and went with USBLoader GX.

LOVE GX!!! Games play instantly.

Now that i have that working, i tried installing the forwarder so i could have GX as a channel.

I'm not sure what I did here, but all of a sudden, the files are missing from my USB drive. USBLoader can see that 40gb of space is in use, but no files. Has this ever happened to any of you?

I am going to try formatting the drive for NTFS and try again. But the thing that is occurring to me is most USB keys are not meant for heavy read-write operations. The drives that are designed for heavy read/write that can run Windows are not cheap.. Has anyone had success with using a USB key for their drive storage? Should i just get an external HD?

I'm also trying to figure out if somehow during the forwarder or gx process i may have wiped the data, but i don't see how.

Any feedback or guidance would be much apprecaited.

Thanks!

USB and HDD is the same thing

 

[Night_Lion]

USB and HDD is the same thing

Thank you for getting back to me. A USB Flash drive and an external hard drive are two very different pieces of technology which function very differently.

 

[Shadow#1]

Thank you for getting back to me. A USB Flash drive and an external hard drive are two very different pieces of technology which function very differently.

Nope to the apps and Wii its the same

 

[Night_Lion]

OK that part i agree with. But if the USB flash drive isn't designed to do that much read/write, it could explain how i am losing these partitions.

 

[LongDongSilver]

Thank you for getting back to me. A USB Flash drive and an external hard drive are two very different pieces of technology which function very differently.

they both do the exact same thing in two very different ways, so in essence they are the same to your computer and to your wii

 

[Night_Lion]

Ok, so maybe a better way to ask this question.

Has anyone had success using USB drives to store your games? Or do most of you use external hard drives?

Thanks

 

[LongDongSilver]

As for your partition issue, that most could very well be the fact that small usb drives arent meant for that much abuse.All my usb drives have been larger ones (500gb, 1tb) and have only ever had 1 fail, but it was a clients who had been using it for 4 years

 

[Night_Lion]

Yeah that's exactly what I was thinking. I just ordered an old 500gb external USB 2 drive. Will run with that.

What about my wiiloader vs USBLoader GX issue? Is wiiloader known to be that slow or could i have had something misconfigured?

Thanks!

 

[Night_Lion]

FYI -- I tried and found the same issue when i formatted my 64gb USB key as NTFS. The games suddenly disappeared after a few minutes.
I tried with a second usb key, this time 128gb. Same thing.

Is it possible i have some sort of copy protection creeping up on me? I feel like i disabled all of that in the boot menu hacks, but is there something that could potentially detect the games and disable them?

Thanks again

 

[Shadow#1]

FYI -- I tried and found the same issue when i formatted my 64gb USB key as NTFS. The games suddenly disappeared after a few minutes.
I tried with a second usb key, this time 128gb. Same thing.

Is it possible i have some sort of copy protection creeping up on me? I feel like i disabled all of that in the boot menu hacks, but is there something that could potentially detect the games and disable them?

Thanks again

Fat32 not NTFS

 

[Night_Lion]

Fat32 was how i had it originally. I switched to NTFS to see if it would make a difference. It has to be the fact that im using a flash drive. Ill know in a few days when my new HD comes in.

 

[LongDongSilver]

Fat32 was how i had it originally. I switched to NTFS to see if it would make a difference. It has to be the fact that im using a flash drive. Ill know in a few days when my new HD comes in.

i've always had myn as ExFat and that never happened to me

 

[Night_Lion]

Oh! Everything i read said i could not use EXT. I will try that. I just noticed on my flash drive that the files are still there. So tjey aren't being read properly. Ill try EXTFS. Thanks!

 

[Lazyboss]

Always place your USB flash\HDD at the back of the Wii, wiiflow never worked for me for some reason, i faced few problems with usb loader gx, the best for me is cfg usb loader as i never face a single problem with it, you should try it.
or it could be your forwarder created some issues to your loader, reinstall the loader and check, as for flash usb stick vs HDD better go with external HDD as flash usb will die fast.

 

[LongDongSilver]

Lazy is right CFG loader is the way to go just replace the music because the default music is bound to give you a migrane

 

[Night_Lion]

Thanks guys. CFG loader worked like a charm. Not sure why The others keep hanging. CFG Loader is amazing right now. And yeah, the music is terrible.


Thanks keep you all posted.

 

[Lazyboss]

Thanks guys. CFG loader worked like a charm. Not sure why The others keep hanging. CFG Loader is amazing right now. And yeah, the music is terrible.


Thanks keep you all posted.

just change the music in the file usb-loader in the root of the sd card, remove tetris.mp3 and put your own music and rename it tetris.mp3

 

[GreyWolf]

Nope to the apps and Wii its the same

No, it's not at all, otherwise USB flash drives would work fine.
------------

You cannot use exFAT for Wii loaders. Only Nintendont supports it.

And yes, flash drives are horrible on the Wii.

 

[Delirium666]

No, it's not at all, otherwise USB flash drives would work fine.
------------

You cannot use exFAT for Wii loaders. Only Nintendont supports it.

And yes, flash drives are horrible on the Wii.

what do you recommend? ive installed and deleted HBC a few times and redone the backup with bootmii. Ive used a SDHC 8gig and 1gig older SD card. My external USB drives have been a old seagate 500gig external and a newer scandish usb 32g. i havent noticed much difference with either. and this is the first ive heard of the Wii not liking flash. Pretty sure my nub 32g


I picked up a second wii to learn to mod it, $30. NES-n64/sega were easily running in the first 30 mins of my attempts. Wii titles took a little longer. Ive gotten into usbloader and have backed up my collection and tried a few DLs. The wfbs games that are not my direct backups seem to load 3x as long or more. I mean normal games load in 5-10 seconds, and mostly with usbloadergx im loading in 30-60 seconds. Exiting back to the menu, when it works, takes 15-60 seconds.

My end goal is to have nes.snes.n64.wii titles launched from wiiflow like ive seen in several videos. I have wiiflow but didn't fully explore it when i did have it installed. ive since scrubbed that attempt and restarted using usbloader. Still running from the HBC which i dont think is a big deal. it just got working correctly so adding the channel is next. But ideally id like the emulator select that ive seen in wii-flow. Ultimately if its too big a headache id just do what i am now and launch the emulators from their own apps/channels.

ive installed and deleted HBC a few times and redone the backup with bootmii. Ive used a SDHC 8gig and 1gig older SD card. My external USB drives have been a old seagate 500gig external and a newer scandish usb 32g. i havent noticed much difference with either. and this is the first ive heard of the Wii not liking flash. Pretty sure my nub 32g.

Havent really talked to anyone about this just gone thru different tutorials and youtube vids. its nice that 4.3 is like the final update to deal with but as the same time there is so much outdated guides to doing this that leads to confusion.