Why?

​You have asked for it, so here it is...

USB Partition

The Wii U only allows you to format whole USB storage devices to use them for expanding the storage to store Wii U games. This stroopwafel plugin changes this. It lets you use a partition on your USB storage device for storing Wii U games. You can for example have one partition to use in vWii with USB Loaders and then a second Wii U formatted partition to store your Wii U games.

There are two variants of this plugin: the standard one (wafel_usb_partition.ipx) only mounts the Wii U formatted partition. The sd variant (wafel_usb_partition_sd.ipx) allow you to use a FAT32 partition as a SD card replacement.


If you want instead use a Partition on your SD card as USB storage for Wii U games look here: https://gbatemp.net/threads/sdusb-the-modern-way-to-play-wii-u-games-from-sd-at-full-speed.655744/

Prerequisites

​You need two things:

1. a way to launch minute (usually ISFShax)
2. a USB Storage device, like an external HDD, SSD or industrial USB Flash drive.

For 1. the recommended way is to setup ISFShax, for that we have a guide here: How to set up ISFShax
If you don't want to commit to installing ISFShax yet you can skip the "Installing ISFShax" step in the ISFShax setup guide and instead run it manually through the chosen exploit on every reboot.
Instead if ISFShax you can also use defuse, in case you have that already.
If you want to use the SD emulation feature, you need to setup ISFShax to run completely from SLC (as you won't have a real SD card to load the files from)

For 2. you find already enough recommendations and people with strong optinions on what to use and what not, so I won't go into much detail there. Generally flash drives use the cheapest of the cheapest garbage flahs and therefore won't last long, even brand ones. So it's generally advised to avoid them or make sure it is really a good one by checking if it gives numbers for TBW and implements wear leveling.

Setup

​First of all make a Backup. If anything goes wrong, the whole Disk will be formatted and you lose everything* which was previously on it! You have been warned...

*testdisk might or might not be able to recover something if you are lucky, but do not rely on that.

Partitioning the USB disk​

On Windows you can probably use Disk Management with HDDS. If DIsk Management won't work for you or you have Pen drive you can use a third party tool like Minitool Partition Wizard or Easeus, on Linux you can use gparted.

The general rules are: The partition Table needs to be MBR, not GPT. The first Partition (by number, not physical location) is either ignored or used as SD card (depending on which favor of the plugin you use). If you want to use it as SD card, it needs to be primary (not logical) and formatted FAT32. From the other primary partitions only ones with the NTFS (or exFAT) type will be considered. The phsically last one of those will be chosen and used as (wfs) USB storage.

You can either chose from scratch by deleting all partitions and start from scratch or resize an existing partition to make room.
An example setup would be:
two primary partitions on the USB Disk:

1. FAT32 - (in gparted set lba flag). Here goes the vWii games and homebrew if you use the SD variant of the plugin.
2. NTFS - This partition will be seen by the Wii U as "USB", you use to store the Wii U games on (don't assign a drive letter)

NTFS won't be the file system the Wii U will be using, it is just there to tell the plugin which partition to use. The Wii U will later format it with it's own file system (wfs).

Installing the Plugin​

Get the latest wafel_usb_partition.ipx from here: https://github.com/jan-hofmeier/wafel_usb_partition/releases and place it in your ios_plugins folder. That is either wiiu/ios_plugins on the SD card or /sys/hax/ios_plugins on the slc. For slc you have to rename it to something shorter like usbpart.ipx

Using the Partition

​If you now boot boot back up, the Partition shows up as a USB device, which needs to be formatted and can then be used as usual. Before you start installing stuff on it, I would recommend you connect it back to the PC and check if it worked and the partitions are still there. After formatting the partition, you can also connect an existing USB storage and copy stuff over.

Caveats with the SD emulation

The SD emulation is only present in the Wii U OS. It won't have any affect on vWii and also isn't available in minute. So you can't use it to load the ios_plugins or do backups to in minute.
It should only be used without an actual SD inserted to avoid potential corruption. The Wii U FAT driver only supports one device. If two are connected the one which is detected later is used. If both are connected during bootup the USB one would win, since USB is detected later than the real SD.

 

[AlamosIT]

Wow
I hoped for this for years! Amazing job

 

[BluPhant]

Reading through this, and all the comments, I wanted to get some input before I do this. Recently got a WiiU, and have made it my own, very quickly. Aroma installed, etc.

My use case for this is I currently have an SSD drive with a number of Wii titles on it, and another drive with a few WiiU titles on it. I would like to use a single SSD drive (Considering Kingston XS1000 2TB SSD) for both WiiU and Wii titles.

So I would want to do the SD variant of this, but this confused me:

The SD emulation is only present in the Wii U OS. It won't have any affect on vWii and also isn't available in minute. So you can't use it to load the ios_plugins or do backups to in minute.

I would expect that the vWii would see the FAT32 partition (and be able to use content from it) on the HD, but this would seem to contradict this, or am I misunderstanding this? I guess the question is, how is the FAT32 partition identified in the vWii, is it identified as USB instead of SD?

Basically with the amount of time it takes to set this up and get everything right, I want to do it once and not have to re-do it

Thanks for reading, and thank you to @SDIO for your work on this, it is truly appreciated.

-Blu

 

[SDIO]

The vWii would see the FAT32 partition as usual and you can use it there as an USB device for USB loaders like usual. The HBC can also load homebrew from USB

Post automatically merged: May 30, 2024

@yamaharacer I don't see anything obvious wrong with the mbr, maybe you can upload it raw, then I could test it.

for syslog of aroma: which path does it have?

You would need to use the wupclient.py to connect to the wiiu running aroma.
You need to change the ip in the py file to the wiius ip and then you can launch it from the command line with:

python -i wupclient.py

then you can dump the current syslog with:

w.dump_syslog()

 

[mikefor20]

No it does not, it still only supports MBR.
Here is the text I accidentally posted in the wrong thread last night:

I just did a new release. That should now support the wfs partition to end beyond 2TB on the disk. I partitions itself is still limited to a size of 2TB. But it would now allow scenarios like this:
A 4TB HDD with a 1,9999TB FAT32 partition and a 2TB Wii U (wfs) partition.
WIndows doesn't allow creating a partition on MBR that goes beyond 2TB. Minitool pPartition Wizard seems to have the same limitation, but gparted (on linux / live cd) allows it.

If we want to use more than 2TB for Wii U games MBR becomes a problem, since doesn't allow partitions bigger than 2TB.
I have a few possible options to work around it, but none seems particular nice to me:

1. Don't have partitions at all, just use the whole disk like normal, but emulate the 4k sectors to address the whole size
2. use GPT - That would make the FAT32 partition mostly unusable, since the Wii U only understands MBR for SD and I assume USB loaders on vWii also only support MBR
3. Use Hybrid MBR + GPT - I don't know a tool which can set them up conveniently
4. Have a 2TB partition / have it end at 2TB but also just use the unpartitioned after the partition - This might not be what users expect to happen and might lead to dataloss, if they somehow create a partition after that (which wouldn't be possible without hybrind GPT) or something like that

I would tend to implent 1 as a PoC and then do 4, as that seems the easiest to most users.

But I am not sure if I should even do that. I don't see how anyone would need more than 2TB with the 300 title limit. And that limit is nothing that I am going to remove. It is i the Wii U menu, a totally different part of the system than what I am touching atm.
Also I would need someone to test that. I don't have a spare 3TB 512byte sector HDD laying around and I don't feel like spending the time filling it up. So if someone want it, they would have to test it.

So what are your opinions on that?

The title limit doesn't matter.. Use USB loader GX or WiiFlow.

Post automatically merged: Thursday at 2:32 AM

I did this a while back and the Wii saw it okay.. Will this work with your plugin?

https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-...-on-a-wii-as-a-single-fat32-partition.602038/

It converts block sizes and allows the Wii to see my whole 5TB HDD. Its GPT but the Wii sees it as MBR I think.

Post automatically merged: Thursday at 7:15 PM

Am I wrong?

 

[SDIO]

It seems the WD that is linked in the other Post can format some WD HDDs to 4k sectors. I didn't know there were HDDs which support that, I only knew it from NVMes, where it is more common.
The rest of that post seems unnecessary complicated. Your HDD is probably only MBR without GPT. Since the HDD exposes 4K sectors MBR and FAT32 can address all the space.
This is just what I meantioned earlier, that there are HDDs with 4k sectors.

 

[Incure]

Is it also possible to use 2 NTFS partitions? I want use it for USB Loader GX on vWii for games and for Wii U, plus use my SD card for any vWii homebrew. USB Loader GX supports NTFS partitions, or does the app won't recognise the partitions in a 2 partition NTFS setup?

 

[SDIO]

Yes that would work. Just use the first one for vWii and the second will be Wii U