Hacking Restoring Wii Games from deleted WBFS partition

[robmcp1888]

Hi All,

I'm in need of some kind assistance.

I have a WD 250gig HDD which I previously had formatted as follows:

Partition1: NTFS 50gb
Partition2: FAT32 32gb
Partition3: Unallocated 18gb
Partition4: WBFS 150gb (with 28 games)

Last night, in a moment of madness, I deleted the WBFS partition and created another FAT32 partition to give:

Partition1: NTFS 50gb
Partition2: FAT32 32gb
Partition3: Unallocated 136gb
Partition4: FAT32 32gb

I then deleted the new FAT32 partition and reformatted all the unallocated space as WBFS to give:

Partition1: NTFS 50gb
Partition2: FAT32 32gb
Partition3: WBFS 168gb

The outcome of this is that all my Wii games are now floating in the WBFS partition, using a hex editor I can find the start of the original WBFS partition and the data for all the games, but i'm unsure as to what to do next.

I realise I have complicated the problem as my new WBFS partition is bigger than the original.

Does anyone have any suggestions/tools, or am I best to scrap it and start gain.

Thanks
Rob

 

[soulfoot]

i had the exact same problem, was able to only recover about half of my games though

http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=182970

may be of some help

moral of the story dont change the size of your wbfs partition

 

[Slyakin]

...Sorry dude, but resizing your WBFS partition was a big mistake. You have to back up your games, or your left with some pretty strange stuff.

Use the tool mentioned by soulfoot, that should help.

 

[robmcp1888]

Thanks for the responses guys.

The method of changing the 00 to 01 for each game you have using hex won't work for me as I already have these as 01s, problem is the sector with this data is floating in the middle of the WBFS partition and is not recognised.

I think my only option is if there is a tool that can somehow recognise iso images. I'll try WIT it seems to have helped a lot of people.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[robmcp1888]

Ah Soulfoot - I read your earlier post - thanks for pointing that out.

I think our situations are pretty similar.

Are you saying that you made your WBFS partition larger which caused the problem, you then formatted the larger partition to NTFS, then back to WBFS.

Then you reset all the 00 to 01s and were able to see the games using WBFS manager.

If that's what you did, I think i'll give that a go. Are there any further steps?

Thanks!

 

[PsyBlade]

from what you wrote the wbfs data should still be intact afaict
simply creating a new partition starting at the wbfs header should do the trick
but only create the partition DO NOT create a filesystem on it

starting over would be preferable in terms of possible corruption
if some part of a game was overwritten it will behave weird in some way
from garbled textures to possibly corrupting its savegame

 

[robmcp1888]

ok so nothing has worked.

With a hex editor I can see the titles on the drive, but no program seems to be able to identify them including WIT/WWT

Looks like it's toasted.... ah well

 

[Wiimm]

restore the old partition table, but don't format.
Then try "wwt analyze" and read the docu to interpret the output.

OR if working with linux:
Find the offset of the beginning of WBFS and use "losetup --offset offset" to define a loop device.

 

[robmcp1888]

Hi Wiimm,

Thanks for the suggestion.

I did try that but no luck.

Is there any command that can extract a wii game iso from a hard disk partition?

What Imean is, the game data is all sitting there, unharmed, but due to formatting problems, no tool can seem to see the ISO images. No amount of formatting or re-formatting will ever solve this because the the size of the WBFS partition has changed.

 

[Wiimm]

wwt -p /dev/loop0 any_command