Hacking USB Loader GX stopped recognizing my HDD

[Ikuste]

Hello. This may have been answered already, but I couldn't find a working solution for me doing a quick search. I hope someone can help me see what's not working.
Basically USB Loader GX was working just fine with my HDD (minutes before it stopped doing so), I was installing games on my HDD and playing them off it, but after:
-deleting the old USB Loader GX app (conserving the newest one I was launching fomr HBC)
-deleting the old USB Loader GX forwarder channel
-plugging my HDD to my computer to add some other games
it stopped recognizing my HDD. No games were showing anymore, and no used/free space was showing anywhere. In the loader/hard drive settings, the partition (NTFS) showed just fine.


Here is the "full" context:

I haven't played games off my HDD for a time now. I had an older version of USB Loader GX in use, along with a forwarder channel. I recently downloaded the most recent version and was launching it from HBC without a problem. I have installed several games from my DVD to my HDD, which already had some games installed from before, and played them a bit. The HDD is formatted to NFTS, but has been reading games from the WBFS folder until now just fine. After installing some Wii games, it let me install some GC games into the main path (which was in HDD\games), but I had not tried them. Then, I deleted the old USB Loader GX version via HBC and deleted the forwarder channel from the Wii channel settings menu itself, and plugged the HDD to my computer to swap in some new games I don't have in CD/DVD. Then, I moved it back to the Wii, but the loader won't recognize it anymore.

I've read that a solutions seems to be to change the loader cIOS to 58. Did it, didn't work. Changed it back and set all the settings to default, didn't work. I've read that I may need to instal d2x v8 final, base IOS 56, version 21008 into IOS 249 (https ://gbatemp.net/threads/almost-total-noobie-questions-about-usb-loader-gx.483759/#post-7571465). Did it, but didn't work. I then tried changing loader cIOS in the loader and then in meta.xml as per some suggestions in other threads, but not a single one worked.

 

[GreyWolf]

Is it actually a hard drive or is it a flash drive? If a hard drive was working before there is no reason it should have stopped working unless the filesystem got corrupted or the drive itself died. Flash drives, on the other hand, have a more limited write life.

Perhaps you reconnected the drive to the wrong port on your console?

 

[Ikuste]

Hi. Thanks for your reply. It is a hard drive, yes. I connected it as I've always done, to port 0 (the one more to the edge), and checked my config was set to that same port. I checked port 1, too, just in case, but nothing changed. It still works when I connect it to my PC, so I don't think it's died. So... maybe it's the filesystem, as you suggest? Ages ago I had it partitioned half to NFTS and half to WBFS, but as the option of playing games converted to wbfs off NTFS partitions became available, I formatted it all to a single NTFS partition so I would not lose space to store some other files (from my PC). I've just plugged it in my PC and checked Disk Manager, but the only partition is set to primary and seems to be in "correct" status. This is certainly weird.

 

[GreyWolf]

Try running a disc check on it and see if it's corrupted. there's really not any reason to use NTFS or WBFS anymore. FAT32 works perfectly well for both Wii and GC games.

 

[Ikuste]

It's been so long since I ran a chkdsk that I had forgotten it was even possible xD Anyway, I tried. There seemed to be something in need of fixing, but did not solve the issue. The only reason I set it to NTFS was because I didn't want the 4GB filesize limit (I know that WBFS games are either less than that or are separated into more than one file), but I wanted the same HDD for some other misc file usage and storage. Should I try reformatting to FAT32 and see if that works? Also, I tried with a flashdrive and it was recognized by the loader, it let me install S&P2 and even play it, so I suppose it definitely must be something HDD-related —which kinda sucks