gene0915 said:
I was dumping SMG tonight and it froze at 57%. I turned the Wii off and cleaned the disc and it dumped perfectly on the 2nd attempt but I'm wondering..... on a Windows system, if you force a reboot when the system is hung or do an instant reboot or something, this sometimes triggers chkdsk to run. Since I had to force my Wii to reboot while the dumping process was locked up.... how does the USB_Loader app deal with that? Can this feature be added to v1.3? (Some sort of "Check partition for errors")?? To clean up slack space and what not.
He wrote his own filesystem. My guess is (from what I've read on Waninkoko's blog and on HackMii) that this is an *extremely* simple filesystem. Basically something like [SizeOfDump1][DataPartitionFromWiiDisk1][ChkSum1][SizeOfDump2][DataPartitionFrom
iiDisk2][ChkSum2]... (Now, unless he's braindead, it needs to be a little more complicated (IE, it needs to be able to at least allow fragmentation of the [DataPartition] blocks, but this is the basics)
If you've ever used WiiScrubber, you'll note that Wii game ISOs always have 3 partitions; an info partition 0, an update partition, and a game data partition. When you use BackupLoader or GeckoOS, they tell the Wii to launch the data partition directly. Partition 0 is where the random data is stored that Scrubber 0s out to make the image compressible.
Essentially, all Waninkoko's USB Loader needs to do is point the GeckoOS code to the start of the DataPartition dump (he doesn't handle multiple files, just dumps that partition that contains multiple files) and let the GeckoOS code take over.
So what does this mean in relation to your question? There's no filesystem corruption. Ever. Well, it's possible, but only for an extremely short window. All writes can be planned out ahead of time, and if the checksum is invalid (ie, the dump failed or the disk corrupted) he knows that whole dump is bad and tosses it all out. Since you only EVER write files when you add a new game disk, that's all you can corrupt. Playing games is read only, so feel free to yank power whenever you feel like it. The most you can do is damage the current dump, and that'll be damaged by nature of being incomplete anyway.