Hardware Please help, need to save wbfs files on back up drive, with Hex.

[Burke]

I have all my wii games on a back up drive, I went to make a copy of the drive to have in the other room for the kids, and hit format by mistake.

I know from this post below I can save the files, using Hex Editor

However, im not understanding the post that well I guess. When I search for wbfs I get this. in the first image, and I can find all the games listed on the drive, but no idea how to recover them, pictured in the second picture, any advice would be great.

It formatted the drive from wbfs to ntfs btw.

What you need to do (theoretically) is:

1. Get a hex editor that can handle hard drive partitions. e.g. HxD http://mh-nexus.de/en/
2. Search for "WBFS" - this will probably be at sector 63 or 64
3. Change the 0x00's from byte 12 onwards to 0x01 for however many games you have on the disc.
4. thats it

You can find out how many images you have on there by looking at the successive sectors and counting the disc titles you find.

The first 12 bytes in the partition sector are:
"WBFS"
4 bytes of partition size
4 bytes of housekeeping (size of sector, size of wbfs sector, two pads)

The rest of the sector is the usage table and thats what you need to change.​

 

[Vampire Lied]

I don't know about this Wii stuff, but a quick Google asking the same question as OP led me to a data recovery program's site. Someone had the same problem and were basically told they were out of luck and should've had their drive formatted for fat32 which can handle games installed from disc and scrubbed downloaded games just fine.
Wbfs system used less space, but they were told if it had been fat32 they could recover. Since they used wbfs, nothing would read it correctly to recover it. I looked at that hex editor you have too and couldn't figure out how that would lead to helping u to extract the data.
Maybe someone who knows more can help, but sounds like your sol and have to start from scratch.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

 

[FAST6191]

Interesting- I had come across this before but did not know people had actually gone as far as to figure out what needed doing in such a situation (granted my approach at that point was to try extracting data rather than repair partitions).

First though I sense the untitled2.jpg showing wbFs is probably a coincidence (stamps are usually one or the other as far as letter case goes and your recovery technique mentions a lot of 00 around it which that does not have) and if that was not enough it looks like it is past the sections that house the game data (the sectors thing at the top right of the icons set should be accurate here).

 

[Vampire Lied]

This thread might help:
http://gbatemp.net/threads/wbfs-hd-corrupted-any-chance-to-recover.197745/
Looks like the resolved similar issue.
But u did state it accidentally git formatted to a different type, so it might be a lost cause. Good luck.

 

[PsyBlade]

that tutorial (the OPs one) is only good if you overwrite a WBFS partition with a fresh WBFS
you probably overwrote it with FAT32 or NTFS

that destroyed a lot more information than reformating as WBFS would have
without experience in both hexediting and WBFS is see no chance of you fixing it yourself with pure hexediting
(that "wbFs" string is incidental and not what you were looking for by the way)
I'm not even sure that it can be recovered at all
If it can its not going to be easy or fast
Consider cuting your losses and start fresh
(this time with a FAT32 partition)

your only other option is wiimms toolset

I suggest you now make that copy you wanted and perform all recovery tries on that copy
if things go haywire you simply make a new one

some things to try:
1. wwt has a recovery function you can try
2. format to WBFS and then try the recovery
3. format to WBFS and try the manual hexediting aproach from above

Should you be able to fix it do yourself a favor and switch to FAT32 (or NTFS at least)