Hacking UStealth - Wii U 'Format Disk' Nag workaround :)

[OriginalHamster]

I will soon be switching from a modded Wii to a WiiU. Right now all of my apps are on my HDD and I do not keep anything on an SD card. If I use UStealth do I have to move all of my apps to the SD card for them to load?

Yes and no, right now only Nintendont, WiiXplorer, USBLoaders, WiiMC, and some GX emulators are UStealth compatible, they will work if launched from your HDD, apps compiled before UStealth needs to be launched from SD since they won't detect your HDD.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Yes and no, right now only Nintendont, WiiXplorer, USBLoaders, WiiMC, and some GX emulators are UStealth compatible, they will work if launched from your HDD, apps compiled before UStealth needs to be launched from SD since they won't detect your HDD.

Wait, Nintendont is compatible now?? Or are you talking about an unofficial build?

 

[Cyan]

unofficial build, you can find it on the first post of nintendont thread. At the bottom (in the FAQ) there's a link to the stealth builds.

edit:
http://homebrew.svalas.net/nintendont/


Edit2:
Nintendont is now supported officially.

 

[AbdallahTerro]

yeah my compilations are also ustealth compatible, especially the latest revisions:
http://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendont-themes-and-custom-mods.374469/

 

[pokeparadox]

Tiny bit of news for you. I've managed to create a proof of concept of UStealth using mono for Linux.

I don't have anything I feel comfortable to share as yet as it still has some quirks... and I have had to recover my drive once so far.
That being said. I've sucessfully hidden, tested on WiiU with loader and then unhidden from my Xubuntu install.

I will want some brave people that have space to backup or a spare HDD for some beta testing soon. Please send me a PM and I will reply once I have the first version for initial beta testing. (Please note, I am nothing to do with the UStealth project. I'm just hacking about with the source in MonoDevelop...)

 

[TeamScriptKiddies]

Wait, what exactly are we talking about?

 

[Cyan]

either an option to hide/unhide HDD without using command like and dd ?
Or adding support for 55AB signature natively on computers to list HDD content whithout un-hidding it?

 

[pokeparadox]

The first one... Although internally it is using terminal commands.

The second option would be great, but I haven't a clue how to do that...

EDIT:
To clarify Mono only seems to read mounted drives. With the drive Ustealthed we can't mount it.
I've used some bash commands to find information about the drives and the dd commands mentioned earlier in this thread.

I've added in a way to request a password for sudo and run the priviledged commands with this password as needed.

A bit more work and it should be ready.

EDIT2:
So I'm trying to squash a couple of obvius bugs. e.g. If you hide a drive and then try and inhide it it locks up... I'm not sure why this is. The application is now functional but it's more user experience issues...

If anyone wants to test this semi working version then, again, please PM.

 

[karloz25]

So I have a 1TB HDD
2 partitions

350gb Media
650gb Wii Games

If I (Hide) the drive, I lose my media (or its hidden) and no longer accessible,
Any chance this or other programs can hide only 1 partition?

Thanks

 

[Zaide]

So I have a 1TB HDD
2 partitions

350gb Media
650gb Wii Games

If I (Hide) the drive, I lose my media (or its hidden) and no longer accessible,
Any chance this or other programs can hide only 1 partition?

Thanks

There's no point in only hiding one partition. The Wii U will still nag you to format the other.

 

[75mak]

I think this is your issue, and there's not a lot you can do.

Nintendont use IOS58 to access USB.
When using IOS58, all 4 USB Port are available, and mounted in decreased order (Port3, Port2, Port1, Port0).

If you plug WiiU drive in a higher port than your vWii drive, it's the WiiU drive which is mounted first.
if you invert vWii and WiiU drive, vWii will be mounted first and Nintendont will see the FAT32 partition.

When using cIOS capable of multiple ports (Hermes v4, Hermes v5.1, d2x v9, d2x v10-alt), the USB Ports are mounted in incrementing order (Port0 then Port1).
So, when using cIOS you must plug vWii in port0 and WiiU in Port1, (but can't launch nintendont, as it uses IOS58 and will mount the drives in reversed order)

I think cIOS d2x on vWii has an issue. A lot of users reported that multiple port support is broken and not working as expected.

If you use another cIOS (v10 not alt), it reads only Port0.

What would be good is if nintendont can select the partitions to mount instead of mounting the first encountered drive.

Can I use a 1tb USB drive with 2 500gb partitions.

The setup I'm thinking of is hiding fat32 partition(using stealth tool) with vWii wbfs titles and allowing WiiU to see the 2nd partition which can be formatted to wiiU format.


Would the above work?

 

[pokeparadox]

You cannot partition a Wii U drive. The WiiU won't let you. It always formats the full Fisk.

 

[75mak]

You cannot partition a Wii U drive. The WiiU won't let you. It always formats the full Fisk.

Is there a program/app to change or report a different disk size and let the wiiU think it is formatting the whold disk.

I know a few years ago there were many Chinese USB sticks that were selling that when inserted into windows would show up as 8gb or 16gb USB drives but were in reality 512mb or 1gb sticks pretending to show more memory.

Would it be possible to use a program that can do that to one partition of the drive making wiiU think that is the whole drive not just 1 partition (leaving the other partition hidden)

Edit: OK, I now know above is not possible after reading a much older thread on here and in particular this post by cyan.

The WiiU formats the drive entirely starting from sector 0 (so replacing the MBR, partition table used by computer).
That's why GParted don't see any partition and tell you it's unallocated (because it doesn't know the format, there's no table at all, so for GParted it can't even tell you that there's a single partition without table)

I don't think you can add a partition without referencing it in a table (even if it's theoretically possible).
If you create a table, it will delete sector 0 and will corrupt the entire WiiU partition.
If you create a partition without a table, it will corrupt the partition at the physical place/sector where you created your partition. As long as the WiiU doesn't decrypt the entire partition when mounting it (decrypt only references sectors in its own encrypted table), you can have your partition cohabiting, but no program will be able to access it as it won't be references by any partition table unless you provide the exact starting sector number manually.

Maybe common key could help decrypt the format type/method on wiiU. And would it be possible to make a custom formatting tool that allows you to build a partition from a set sector on any given sized drive. E.g. on 1tb wiiU drive, you can create a new partition without partition table (sector0) but partition is created at sector 500 for example. This info is then given to vWii loader program e.g. wiiflow or cfg. So cfg knows to look for sector 500 for partition when wiiU format drive is inserted?

 

[Cyan]

And would it be possible to make a custom formatting tool that allows you to build a partition from a set sector on any given sized drive. E.g. on 1tb wiiU drive, you can create a new partition without partition table (sector0) but partition is created at sector 500 for example. This info is then given to vWii loader program e.g. wiiflow or cfg. So cfg knows to look for sector 500 for partition when wiiU format drive is inserted?

WiiU key to decryp the drive will not be useful. what's needed is to rewrite the way the WiiU access the drive, not the drive data itself.

It's possible to have WiiU+Other partitions on the same drive, but it requires multiple things:
1- It's possible to trick the HDD size and semi-permanently hide part of the drive by using HPA. (the drive reports a different size to every console, OS, devices and partition manager instead of its real size).
2- it's possible to move the partition table at the end of the drive (in fact, it's already done automatically when using GPT).

by mixing 1+2, you can have multiple partitions on the same drive.

The issue :
HPA is currently working only on Linux.
I don't know if it's possible on Wii and WiiU (maybe!)
if it's not possible, then you would have to put your HDD on Linux, change the drive size, play vWii, put the drive on Linux, change the drive size, play on WiiU etc.
it's even more an hassle than just un-plugging a second drive !

If it works on Wii, there could be a homebrew to format and resize the drive.
I don't have time to work on it for the moment. so please, just use two drives and Ustealth.

 

[silvers4640]

Is it possible to use ustealth with emulators like snes9x? Everytime i try to boot a rom it kicks me back to the wiiflow menu after a few seconds.

 

[Hielkenator]

Is it possible to use ustealth with emulators like snes9x? Everytime i try to boot a rom it kicks me back to the wiiflow menu after a few seconds.

I would like to know too.
I still use my wii for emulation purposes.

Can you still use apps like Snesgx, FCEultra, retroarch etc?
I am loading apps from sd only, content, roms etc are on hdd.

Or do these apps need to be compiled with the new libfat?

 

[OriginalHamster]

I would like to know too.
I still use my wii for emulation purposes.

Can you still use apps like Snesgx, FCEultra, retroarch etc?
I am loading apps from sd only, content, roms etc are on hdd.

Or do these apps need to be compiled with the new libfat?

I think there are a snesgx with UStealth support (not sure), retroarch doesn't have UStealth support saddly, I tried recompiling it myself but there are many libraries missing in my devkit framework, also it seems latest release was compilated using an old libogc version, so could be some incompatibilities. In top of that retroarch works with around seven different .dol, not sure if I need recompile everyone of them or just the main menu boot...

 

[alcab]

Hello!

First of all, thanks for this great tool. It 's very useful. I'd also like to say thanks to the person responsible for the USB Toogle app for Wii U. I use it a lot to make my hard drive "visible" and then use not compatible apps.

I was wondering if there is a forwarding channel for USB Toggle, or a Universal forwarder channel for vWii I could configure for USB Toogle. Just to skip the process of accessing Homebrew Channel to activate it.

Thanks again for this amazing job!

 

[75mak]

So does the homebrew channel detect a ustealth hard drive to read the apps from there?

 

[TotalInsanity4]

So does the homebrew channel detect a ustealth hard drive to read the apps from there?

Not currently