Hacking suggestions to SD/USB Loader

[JimmyZ]

i'm not offending developers who spend their precious time on this fantastic piece of work, just some thought about it

why not ditch wbfs and simply use FAT?

originally posted here: libwbfs thead

Pros:

1st, we can simply translate ISO's into wbfs dump and copy them to a FAT file system on any OS, utilities only needs access to files, while accessing raw partition is, harder, at least in some situations, for example the windows utility takes drive letter to indicate the partition, got some report that users lost their drive letter, and windows was unable to assign a new driver letter to an unrecognized partition.

2nd, becoz of wbfs, if we wanna use sd loader, we have to partition it, this is not a big deal for linux users but windows can't create partitions on "removable drives", even if you created it under linux, windows can't recognize the later partitions after the first one.

3rd, miserable bugs like delete a game corrupt the whole file system will surely be gone.

4th, avoid partition on sd card also makes use of every bytes of our tini tiny little sd card simpler, imagine you've partitioned your 16GB sd card like this: FAT 1GB for homebrew/VC on SD, 15GB for wbfs, one day your FAT partition exceed it's capacity and you wanna install a new VC, you're f*cked and have to repartition the whole damn card even you have space in the wbfs partition.

Cons:

1st, the damn 4GB FAT32 file size cap, not quite a big deal, we can simply split the dump like ssbb.001/ssbb.002

2nd, additional FAT layer may slower the load speed a bit, not quite a big deal again since it will still way better than the optical drive, i think.

well i have not read the source code extensively, but theoradically that could be possible as of my acknowledgement, if i'm wrong, plz point me out

 

[DarkCamui]

It would be amazing if http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ would be implented.

 

[JimmyZ]

It would be amazing if http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ would be implented.

ntfs is nice coz there is no 4GB file size cap, but, porting ntfs-3g will be quite a big job i think, and most likely you still have to keep a FAT partition on SD Card, becoz the System Menu need a FAT partition to backup saves, run VC from SD, etc.

 

[prime17nl]

Why not implement the (Readonly) NTFS code from GRUB4DOS (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=104188&package_id=111982&release_id=672393) .

I prefer readonly NTFS over the ability to dump my games to a WBFS partition. Make both an option

 

[WiiCrazy]

File system stuff is in the ios side... how many skilled coders we have in this regard?
I'm sure Kwiirk had his reasons when doing this with a custom filesystem...

 

[cwstjdenobs]

No one who has to work directly with filesystems likes FAT, and while NTFS was good when it was released, not a lot of people like it anymore, for obvious reasons, and it seems Wanin is one of them.

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev...history_state0=

check the response to "My 6 Hour Trip to the Dark Side"

 

[Arm the Homeless]

Waninkoko doesn't like NTFS. And FAT is just horrible.

I nominate EXT2.

 

[Linuks]

Yeah or EXT2/3/4 should be good !

 

[Arm the Homeless]

Yeah or EXT2/3/4 should be good !

EXT3 is a journaling filesystem. We don't need that. Unnecessary for what we're doing.
EXT4 has a no-journal mode. But we don't really have a fstab on the USB Loader, do we?

EXT2 is good enough. It's used on /boot partitions on computers everywhere.

AND there's a EXT2/3 driver for Windows (full read + write access), which doesn't work on EXT4 (last time I checked).
And since we don't need EXT3 with it's journaling, EXT2 is perfect.

EDIT: Here's the EXT2 driver for OS X.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/

Ditch WBFS and go for EXT2.

 

[JimmyZ]

again... anything else other than FAT do not fit the 2nd and the 4th quote...

 

[Scolor]

WBFS is good for backups, because it also scrubs games while you're copying it.

Why you want the old Fat32? :|

 

[manias]

this is not ever gonna change, forget about other filesystems

auto-scrubbing ftw

 

[oldskool75]

Maybe people should start thinking of a wbfs driver for windows, linux/mac, etc for native access.. ;-)

 

[supagusti]

My opinion is that EXT3 would be the best choice.
EXT4 has some problems that EXT3 never had.
NTFS is some sort of closed source software, which has been reverese engineered, but pretty hard to port I think
FAT16/FAT32 is not suitable due to it's heavy limitations.

 

[piratesmack]

My opinion is that EXT3 would be the best choice.
EXT4 has some problems that EXT3 never had.
NTFS is some sort of closed source software, which has been reverese engineered, but pretty hard to port I think
FAT16/FAT32 is not suitable due to it's heavy limitations.

As said above, we don't need a journaling filesystem since the drive won't be written to very often.
WBFS is fine now that that data corruption bug is fixed.

 

[FenrirWolf]

The game corruption bug is gone and there are a variety of well made GUIs now. There's no reason to move away from WBFS now.

 

[JimmyZ]

seems no one is reading the original post, i want this thread closed.

 

[FenrirWolf]

I read it. I just don't have much to say about it since most of it deals with SD Card loading and I haven't experimented with that at all since my largest card is 2GB in size. The most compelling argument is the drive letter business, since a fair number of people seem to have difficulty getting it set up correctly.

 

[Screemer]

but native access to the harddrive sd-card on every computer would be great. for example i only have 1 portable hdd and i used to store a kind files on there to carry them around without any partitions. now i had to create partitions and it's impossible to use the complete filesize under my os. very sad. a solution would be a driver for wbfs for windows/linux/etc.. the downside of such a driver would be, that you had to install it on every system you are planing to use the portable drive. in my eyes that would be very 'portable'.

 

[cwstjdenobs]

but native access to the harddrive sd-card on every computer would be great. for example i only have 1 portable hdd and i used to store a kind files on there to carry them around without any partitions. now i had to create partitions and it's impossible to use the complete filesize under my os. very sad. a solution would be a driver for wbfs for windows/linux/etc.. the downside of such a driver would be, that you had to install it on every system you are planing to use the portable drive. in my eyes that would be very 'portable'.

If you're happy with the command line you could just put wbfs_win.exe on the NTFS/FAT whatever you are using partition or one of the no install gui managers.