Hacking Rip backup game discs to HDD

[Ssseth]

For the ISO's on the PC hard drive

Option 1:Burn to disc and rip to HDD
Option 2:Hook up the external to the PC and do it that way

What about putting it on a SD card (I have a 8GB one) and then putting the SD card in the Wii and transfering that to the hard drive some how. Is that possible?

 

[Skizzo]

Whew. Well I went and booted up the program and had the same initial results as you are reporting. Thought "OH SHIT!". Anyways, I can't say for sure what, if any, of the following fixed it, but I went and removed MS .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as WBFS Manager 3.0, then did a reboot. Started up the program again, and when I changed the USBdrv1 parameter to my drive letter, it seemed like it was going to be screwed up again because it wasn't showing all the games on the drive as quickly as the other WBFS managers, but I did some web browsing and when I came back the games were all listed, and then I clicked on the Load button next to the DVDdrive box (which I set to my PC's DVD drive letter, obviously) and lo and behold, it works as expected (so far). It lists the game's TITLE ID, NAME, and SIZE.

OK, well I just gave it a test run and it appears to have added the game fine, but something still isn't right. It's taking a long time to update the list of games on the drive afterwards. I don't know if this is simply due to the number of games on the drive (>300) or something else. I think I'm going to uninstall some more .Net stuff and see if that improves anything. I might have been a bit too optimistic in my memory of the speed of ripping or something might be causing a slowdown, because the game I just ripped was reported as being 1.67GB and it took ~3 mins. which means a full disc might take just shy of ~8 mins.

One other possible cause of the problem might be that I formatted this current drive with other software and not this particular application. I just repartitioned/reformatted it recently, but I can say that I never had any problems with it previously using any of the other software, if I did indeed use this software to init it before I started adding my backups to it (I honestly can't remember as that was probably over 4-5 months ago). Depending on how many games you've already put on the drive, it might be worth trying to start fresh using the InitWBFS button on this app. But like I said, even without doing that, I still got it to work, just not as efficiently as I remember it working when I transferred >125 burnt backups when I first gave USB loaders a go. I was literally popping them in and out of my DVD drive and the 125+ went pretty quickly, relatively speaking. It was neat seeing some games being added in mere seconds.

EDIT: Glad to see it worked for you. I'm still going to see if there's anything I can do to improve its performance on my end, although I don't really have any use for it anymore as I haven't burnt a backup game in ages (well, 4-5 months).

 

[Skizzo]

For the ISO's on the PC hard drive

Option 1:Burn to disc and rip to HDD
Option 2:Hook up the external to the PC and do it that way

What about putting it on a SD card (I have a 8GB one) and then putting the SD card in the Wii and transfering that to the hard drive some how. Is that possible?

Once again, I'm confused.

You're still going to be going up and down, up and down, every time you want to transfer a game (you can only put one unscrubbed ISO image on an 8GB card at a time). So, if you have ISO files sitting on your PC hard drive already (as opposed to making them from burnt backups one at a time with ImgBurn or some other app - in which case you might as well be putting them directly onto the WBFS drive as you've now discovered), the best thing to do is simply get the WBFS manager of your choice, one proven to be reliable, and bring the external WBFS drive to your PC and batch copy the ISO's onto it. Set it and forget it. Wake up in the morning to a WBFS drive full of your games from the ISO's.

 

[Ssseth]

For the ISO's on the PC hard drive

Option 1:Burn to disc and rip to HDD
Option 2:Hook up the external to the PC and do it that way

What about putting it on a SD card (I have a 8GB one) and then putting the SD card in the Wii and transfering that to the hard drive some how. Is that possible?

Once again, I'm confused.

You're still going to be going up and down, up and down, every time you want to transfer a game (you can only put one unscrubbed ISO image on an 8GB card at a time). So, if you have ISO files sitting on your PC hard drive already (as opposed to making them from burnt backups one at a time with ImgBurn or some other app - in which case you might as well be putting them directly onto the WBFS drive as you've now discovered), the best thing to do is simply get the WBFS manager of your choice, one proven to be reliable, and bring the external WBFS drive to your PC and batch copy the ISO's onto it. Set it and forget it. Wake up in the morning to a WBFS drive full of your games from the ISO's.

I'm done transfering all the disc backups. I'm talking about the one or two additional backups Ill be adding a week from now on. The hard drive and Wii are tucked away in a nice spot that isn't really easy to just unplug and move downstairs. Maybe if it was a 2.5" drive, but it's not, it's a honking 3.5" drive with power adapter and everythig.

Maybe I'll just continue to burn a copy and use that to install to the hard drive. I guess it doesn't hurt to have a backup copy anyway. I just won't print out the labels and put them in DVD cases like I used to. A big binder will work fine enough.

Unless of course there is a way to install the games from the SD card like I was asking?

 

[Ssseth]

So it's not possible to install/transfer a game to hard drive from the Wii using a iso on an SD card? That would be a handy app for sure.

 

[Thang_Bom]

If you have an ISO (copy of game), you can copy to WBFS HD/SD. You can convert WBFS back to ISO or clone/copy to another WBFS system without recreating ISO.

WBFS Manager v3.0 will allow you to that.

Sorry if I misunderstood your question.

So it's not possible to install/transfer a game to hard drive from the Wii using a iso on an SD card? That would be a handy app for sure.

 

[Thang_Bom]

Is it truth that the program will list Wii??? first and after it copies, it will list the file name?

When I try and go to the disc drive (D: on my PC) it doesn't see anything there. Same problem was happening with the other programs.

Edit: Well id does have ??WII?????????!. I tried to move that over, we'll see how it goes in a minute.

Edit II: Okay, well that worked! Once it copies over the name of the game shows up fine. Thanks for the link, saved me some time for sure!

 

[rizzod]

Nice SSSETH, Welcome to the family lol!
Nice Avatar btw, i work with James.

 

[Skizzo]

Is it truth that the program will list Wii??? first and after it copies, it will list the file name?

When I try and go to the disc drive (D: on my PC) it doesn't see anything there. Same problem was happening with the other programs.

Edit: Well id does have ??WII?????????!. I tried to move that over, we'll see how it goes in a minute.

Edit II: Okay, well that worked! Once it copies over the name of the game shows up fine. Thanks for the link, saved me some time for sure!

That's what he says. And I had the same problem but it went away after I removed a couple of things from my computer and rebooted. You could possibly give that a try too and see if it helps. When I originally used this program over 5 months ago, I never saw the ??WII?????? bit, the program worked as expected. That's why I tried removing a few things I knew I had installed since then just to see if they might be causing the problem. I can't say for sure removing those actually fixed it, it might have just been the rebooting process and then starting this program immediately afterwards, without running any other WBFS apps beforehand, that did the trick.

QUOTE

Whew. Well I went and booted up the program and had the same initial results as you are reporting. Thought "OH SHIT!". Anyways, I can't say for sure what, if any, of the following fixed it, but I went and removed MS .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as WBFS Manager 3.0, then did a reboot. Started up the program again, and when I changed the USBdrv1 parameter to my drive letter, it seemed like it was going to be screwed up again because it wasn't showing all the games on the drive as quickly as the other WBFS managers, but I did some web browsing and when I came back the games were all listed, and then I clicked on the Load button next to the DVDdrive box (which I set to my PC's DVD drive letter, obviously) and lo and behold, it works as expected (so far). It lists the game's TITLE ID, NAME, and SIZE.

 

[Ssseth]

Is it truth that the program will list Wii??? first and after it copies, it will list the file name?

When I try and go to the disc drive (D: on my PC) it doesn't see anything there. Same problem was happening with the other programs.

Edit: Well id does have ??WII?????????!. I tried to move that over, we'll see how it goes in a minute.

Edit II: Okay, well that worked! Once it copies over the name of the game shows up fine. Thanks for the link, saved me some time for sure!

Yes it ended up listing the file names for me if that is what you are asking. According to the author, ncWBFSTool has DVD -> WBFS as a planned feature for an upcoming update. Not that it helps it you much now though. The GUI on it is a lot nicer than this tool in my opinion.

QUOTE(rizzod @ Oct 20 2009, 06:20 AM)

Nice SSSETH, Welcome to the family lol!
Nice Avatar btw, i work with James.

Cool. I've been a fan of James Rolfe's work for years now. I have him in my news reader and keep up on his latest work. What work do you do with him? Have you been in any of his videos?

 

[Skizzo]

So it's not possible to install/transfer a game to hard drive from the Wii using a iso on an SD card? That would be a handy app for sure.

Hello again. I see you mentioned that your using WiiFlow, but have you been reading the Configurable USB Loader thread? Seems they've come up with a 'WBFS container' format that allows you to do away with the proprietary WBFS partition and keep your games on a FAT32 partition, as .wbfs files. Hopefully the other loaders will get the information necessary to add support for it too, but if you're not adverse to using Configurable for now and feel like switching to FAT32, you could then put .wbfs games onto your basement drive from your computer using FTPii, or WiiXplorer if you want to carry them down on an SD card! I'm really looking forward to giving this a try and will probably be switching over my 1TB drive should all go well. Just thought I'd mention it in case you weren't aware of this development yet.