Hacking Transfering a game from my laptop to my Wii's hard drive?

[Kelemvor]

Howdy,

I came across a folder on my old laptop that has a bunch of my Wii games that I backed up years and years ago. I dusted off my old modded Wii with an external hard drive and wanted to set this up again for my kids to use. However, it's been so long, I have no idea of how to do this any more. I have a couple that are.wbfs and a couple that are .iso.

Can anyone direct me to a guide on how to get this working? I don't recall if I have to connect the HDD to my laptop or if I can do it via SFTP or what. The Wii itself is working fine and has some old stuff on it. I just don't remember how to put some of the ones I removed, back onto it so they are playable again.

Thanks for any help.

 

[migles]

to make stuff easier you can use wii backup manager http://www.wiibackupmanager.co.uk/downloads.html
you will be better connecting the hdd to your pc via usb, you can very likely also go trough ftp but will take a long time :C

here a cool post by cyan https://gbatemp.net/posts/7592791

 

[Kelemvor]

to make stuff easier you can use wii backup manager
you will be better connecting the hdd to your pc via usb, you can very likely also go trough ftp but will take a long time :C

Well, that was the most annoying way to download a file I've seen. Jeez. I'll give it a try.

 

[migles]

Well, that was the most annoying way to download a file I've seen. Jeez. I'll give it a try.

ho, i am sorry, it has been a long time since i downloaded it :C

 

[Kelemvor]

So I ran the WiBackupManager and pointed it at my drive. It said it was a Valid drive but didn't have a WIBS or WFBS or something folder and should it create one. I said Yes and it has the drive there but it doesn't show any of the games that are already on the drive. I don't want to wipe out what's already there (if I didn't already). Any suggestions on what to do so it keeps working?

 

[migles]

So I ran the WiBackupManager and pointed it at my drive. It said it was a Valid drive but didn't have a WIBS or WFBS or something folder and should it create one. I said Yes and it has the drive there but it doesn't show any of the games that are already on the drive. I don't want to wipe out what's already there (if I didn't already). Any suggestions on what to do so it keeps working?

maybe @Cyan could enlight you better
because you might be using the old wbfs formatted or have a dual formatted drive or something like that?

the games still show up in the wii and work when you launch them?

 

[Kelemvor]

Well, just put the drive back onto my Wii and fired up COnfigurable USB Loader. I now get an error that the FAT1 drive isn't found. I tell it to continue anyway and it seems all the games are gone or at least it can't read them. Dunno what to do now.

 

[Cyan]

could you tell us where your games are located on your HDD ?

if they are not in the correct folder, WiiBackupManager can rename both folder and files automatically. (put all your games in folder /wbfs/ or in a subfolder or /wbfs/game title/ and follow the second part of my guide posted above.
if they are in .iso format, I suppose your partition in NTFS (not FAT32). It's fine, but you don't really need the iso format because it's a waste of space, but apart from that there's nothing wrong using the ISO format.

 

[Kelemvor]

I don't know where the games are any more. When I view the HDD now it just shows one folder called WBFS but it's empty except for a Disk.Info file.

The games were backed up using the Configurable USB Launches and choosing the option to copy the disk to the hard drive. This was many years ago so I honestly don't remember much about it.

When I boot up my Wii and go to where the games used to be, I now see a bunch of things that look like game cases but they all show No Game is there. I still get the FAT1 error as well. I can take some pictures if it would help at all.

Thanks!

 

[Kelemvor]

Attaching some pictures I took as I start up the Config USB program.

 

[GreyWolf]

Did you have the drive partitioned as WBFS before?

 

[XFlak]

U probably also want to update your USB loader. If I follow @GreyWolf's line of questioning your hard drive may have been formatted as wbfs as opposed to fat32 and wbfs files. If you USB loader app is of the same Era it won't be able to detect games using newer methods.

 

[migles]

Attaching some pictures I took as I start up the Config USB program.

extremly likely you had a WBFS formatted drive before, you plugged it into the PC, windows asked you to format it and you choose to do it, or someone did formatted that drive, meaning it erased all its games and contents

this is because fat32 is the best current format for the wii and your drive appears to be NTFS formatted, meaning someone did erased the drive using windows defaults..
if it was not erased it would be either fat32 or WBFS (wbfs filesystem doesn't show up in windows and windows will prompt you to format it)
and wii backup manager would detect a wbfs formatted drive, since it prompted that error when you first launched it, your drive was already erased..

this is what i would do:
format it as fat32 (cluster 32kb) (keep in mind, format erases its contents if you already got something inside)
update your wii programs\hacks (again cyan is the best person to tell you this) to more recent with better support

 

[Kelemvor]

I have no idea what file system the drive was before. When I plugged in the drive to my laptop it didn't show any files on it which I expected. I did NOT tell it to format the drive. I ran the Wii backup thing and it told me my drive was valid but it didn't have the wbfs folder and asked it it should create it. I clicked Yes and that's when everything went downhill.

I'd guess this Wii was modded around 10 years ago and hasn't been updated since. It's not a huge deal if I have to redo the games or upgrade things if someone has a nice tutorial/guide for me to follow. I'm just confused why my USB loader shows game folders there but just doesn't show the information about that. It looks like it knows there are games but just can't find them or something so if there's a way to recover them, that'd be great too.

 

[GreyWolf]

WBFS as a partition didn't care if the drive was formatted or not. If it was FAT32 originally and you made a WBFS partition on it the FAT32 info would still be there so it would show up in Windows but you wouldn't see the games because they're written directly to the drive and don't get put into the FAT32 filesystem table.

If the games were written to a WBFS partition and you wrote anything with the drive as if it was FAT32 it's likely a lot of that data got overwritten.

There's no such thing as "FAT1" so I'm not sure what that error means.

You might try completely deleting your CFG Loader settings files and start it from scratch but that wouldn't explain the drive showing as empty on Windows when you said you copied games to it.

 

[Kelemvor]

I don't remember the steps I had to go through way back when in order to get games copied to it. I don't think it was as simple as drag and drop within Windows. I'm pretty sure I either used some other program or did it via FTP or something,.

 

[Kelemvor]

So let's just assume everything from my hard drive is gone. How do I go about resetting everything so I can start over and reload my games? If I need to update my launcher and such too, I'm game to give that a try. Any sort of tutorial/guide would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[XFlak]

Modmii

 

[Kelemvor]

Could you elaborate on that a bit?

 

[XFlak]

Install modmii on your PC, run the main wizard as if modding your wii for the first time (it will overwrite old hacks). When asked if you want to set up a USB loader, answer yes, then follow your custom generated guide