Hacking USB Loader GX Issues with EmuNand and FAT32

[jojojo8359]

Hi all,

I thought I'd take the time to ask the community for a little bit of help regarding an ongoing issue I'm having.

Recently, I've been invested in trying to get some WiiWare to run from a USB drive on my softmodded Wii. When I first started, I dumped the Wii's nand to the FAT32-formatted SD Card, as this was the default location. When I put the WiiWare WAD files on an NTFS-formatted USB drive, everything worked perfectly (aside from resetting the default cIOS to 249, I believe - this fixed the crashing I was experiencing).

However, in the interest of saving space on my SD card (it's only 8GB), I have looked into having the nand dump (for the emuNand) on the USB drive. I tried to dump the nand to the NTFS drive, and it told me that it could only dump to a FAT32 drive.

So, I reformatted my drive to FAT32. And, trying to be clever, I re-dumped the nand to the SD card (after deleting the first one) and copied it onto the USB (now FAT32). All of the default channels showed up, but I could not install any more. After I tried installing channels (and it hanging), I then tried to re-dump the nand to the USB again. Guess what? It hanged.

I tried doing all of this again on another FAT32 drive, and got the same results as the first one.

I also have been experiencing issues exiting some homebrew apps to the Wii Menu after this (from USB Loader GX itself, in particular).

I do have a nand backup before all of this that I could restore.

Please let me know if you have any help to give on this subject, because any help is appreciated.

Also, if you need me to give you any specs of my Wii, just ask in a reply and I would be happy to share that info, I just don't know what info to share to help someone in this field.

Thanks in advance for your help!

-jojojo8359

 

[GreyWolf]

Is it a hard drive or a flash drive? cIOSes don't seem to like flash drives much.

 

[jojojo8359]

GreyWolf,

Thanks for the quick reply!

The two USB drives that I'm using are 32GB Sandisk flash drives.

I was starting to think if the problem was with the permissions related to FAT32, but FAT32, as I found out, doesn't have permissions. :/

 

[Cyan]

you can try to use IOS58 to do all your setup and install while inside the loader (loader's settings > loarder's IOS : 58), but you'll have the same problem when launching a game as it will reload to cIOS249 to get the necessary NAND redirection functions.

what's your cIOS in that slot ?
if it's v10, be sure it's r52 and not r53 (issues with emuNAND).
if it's v8 or v10 r52 it's fine.

what you can try is to use a "base58" to use nintendo's official USB driver instead of the cIOS's custom USB driver, but not all games will work.


The advantage of the flash drive is that they are only 512byte/sector; while newer HDD are mostly 4096bytes/sector which might have issues with emuNAND.
though, like he said, flash drives have detection issues with cIOS, and Write mode problem with every IOS (even 58). You can't install anything to it without a freeze, or corrupting your partition. using emuNAND with flash has a high risk of corruption due to the data being written to the drive (savegame, system files, etc.) while playing.

 

[jojojo8359]

Cyan,

Thanks for the reply and the information.

Because there are write mode problems with flash drives, would you recommend having the emuNand dump on the SD card instead?

My SD card is 8gb, so would you have an estimate of how much storage each installed channel WAD on the emuNand takes up (on the SD card)? Or does it vary too much from each install to really matter?

I’m just trying to get a sense of what my other options are, because the flash drive is not gonna work at this point. :/

 

[Cyan]

yes, SD card is recommended for emuNAND, or a real HDD but you need to find one which is not using 4k/sector if you want to use neek2o. (I think d2x has a fix, but some users reported it doesn't work).


one WAD can't be more than 40MB (it was a nintendo restriction), so you can see how many games you can install on a 8GB partition.
for info, the Wii is 512MB.

 

[jojojo8359]

Ok, thank you so much for the help. It is very much appreciated!