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.

 

[yamaharacer]

Yes ISFShax is setup and everything is on SLC.

Everything gets loaded at bootscreen of minute.

 

[SDIO]

Does the Wii U see the USB device and are you able to use the WFS partition in the data management?

 

[yamaharacer]

yeah the Wii has formated the partition correctly and the wii has it within the data manager

 

[SDIO]

And if you connect it back to the PC, you still see the partitions?
In the partition manager make sure the FAT32 partition is flagged as LBA. The windows ones do that by default on gparted you have to set the flag manually

 

[yamaharacer]

Yeah the partition is still there. LBA also.

 

[SDIO]

Can the Mii maker save to it?

 

[yamaharacer]

No nothing. While bootingni also dont get my aroma selection menu.
And Nintendont forwarder says that boot.dol is missing. So the Wii generaly doesnt recognize the fat32 partition.

 

[SDIO]

The redirection only affects Wii U. On the Wii you would need to select USB in the Homebrew channel to load homebrew from there and I think most forwarders are hardcoded to SD.
Did you make sure the FAT32 partition ist the first one? Can you give the output from sudo parted -l

 

[yamaharacer]

I am not at the PC at the moment. Fat32 is sdc1 and ntfs sdc2 think. I will check with your comment and post reply. Thank you for your help.

 

[geoGolem]

awesome

 

[alcab]

Hello!

New version of the plugin allows the use of USB drives in GPT format?

Thanks a lot!

 

[SDIO]

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?

 

[alcab]

I have to say I have more than enough with a 2TB USB Drive. I even have some space left in my drive. And everything works like a charm!!!

Thanks a lot!

 

[DottMark]

Amazing, now i can put a 2 tb ssd in my wiiu with: gamecube games, wii games, wii u games, my retrogame collection and my wi u will finally sit on the table with more games!
(I too lazy to swap wii hardisks everytime, i prefer to invest far more time and Money to get the job done. )

 

[yamaharacer]

parted -l

Modell: WD Elements 25A2 (scsi)
Festplatte  /dev/sdf:  1000GB
Sektorgröße (logisch/physisch): 512B/512B
Partitionstabelle: msdos
Disk-Flags:

Nummer  Anfang  Ende    Größe  Typ      Dateisystem  Flags
 1      1049kB  419GB   419GB  primary  fat32        lba
 2      419GB   1000GB  581GB  primary

This is what I get out

 

[SDIO]

Hm it looks good to me. Maybe send me the MBR (first 512bytes) and I can have a look if something is up with that.

You can also try to use the wup client to connect to the wupserver, which is running when Aroma is loaded and dump the current syslog through that. It would be interesting to see if a sdcard02 device comes up if you have the Real SD in

Post automatically merged: May 27, 2024

would RAID0 or RAID1 be of interest? Both should increase read performance and RAID1 would protect against the failure of one drive, while RAID0 would give double th ecapacity of the smaller drive.

 

[lordelan]

You can't resize it buttttt you could use ftpiiuu to dump everything on your WFS hdd to your pc and than back after its partitioned but doing that with wii u games considering how much of a pain ftp can be its pretty slow would probably be better to get wups for your games and reinstall that with wup installer gx2 assuming thats possible with ISFShax because I've never heard of that cfw until I saw ops post about SDUSB

It would be way easier to use a second temporary HDD. Connect it to the Wii U, let it format it, then "move" everything over to it.
Then wipe the original HDD, do all sorts of magic (partitioning and whatever), then move all games from the temporary HDD back to it.
Moving can be done with the official Wii U's data management.

 

[ColdBlitz]

It would be way easier to use a second temporary HDD. Connect it to the Wii U, let it format it, then "move" everything over to it.
Then wipe the original HDD, do all sorts of magic (partitioning and whatever), then move all games from the temporary HDD back to it.
Moving can be done with the official Wii U's data management.

I'm only saying this in case you have only 1 external HDD

 

[lordelan]

I'm only saying this in case you have only 1 external HDD

Fair enough

 

[yamaharacer]

Hm it looks good to me. Maybe send me the MBR (first 512bytes) and I can have a look if something is up with that.

You can also try to use the wup client to connect to the wupserver, which is running when Aroma is loaded and dump the current syslog through that. It would be interesting to see if a sdcard02 device comes up if you have the Real SD in

Post automatically merged: May 27, 2024

would RAID0 or RAID1 be of interest? Both should increase read performance and RAID1 would protect against the failure of one drive, while RAID0 would give double th ecapacity of the smaller drive.

mbr dump:

for syslog of aroma: which path does it have?