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.

 

[MysticStarlight]

Thanks for keeping the Wii U alive! Gonna test this soon

 

[JPENA12681]

i read a little into this like two weeks ago, so in layman terms, you can NOW finally emulate play wii u games with an SD card? this being new in 2024,

 

[Xyphoseos]

I have an HDD with all my wiiu game. Is it possible to resize it to include a FAT32 partition without lose any game?

 

[SDIO]

i read a little into this like two weeks ago, so in layman terms, you can NOW finally emulate play wii u games with an SD card? this being new in 2024,

No, this plugin is for using real USB storage. For playing games from the SD card, we already have SDUSB: https://gbatemp.net/threads/sdusb-the-modern-way-to-play-wii-u-games-from-sd-at-full-speed.655744/

I have an HDD with all my wiiu game. Is it possible to resize it to include a FAT32 partition without lose any game?

We don;t have the tools yet to resize wfs. @EyeKey is working on getting write support into the wfs-tools and may add an option for resizing in the future. But even then, shrinking is probably much harder to do than growing. Also resizing involves reencrypting everything and the data would need to be moved anyway to make space in front for the MBR.
So no for now and probably the near future the only option would be to copy the games to a different HDD first.

 

[Xyphoseos]

No, this plugin is for using real USB storage. For playing games from the SD card, we already have SDUSB: https://gbatemp.net/threads/sdusb-the-modern-way-to-play-wii-u-games-from-sd-at-full-speed.655744/


We don;t have the tools yet to resize wfs. @EyeKey is working on getting write support into the wfs-tools and may add an option for resizing in the future. But even then, shrinking is probably much harder to do than growing. Also resizing involves reencrypting everything and the data would need to be moved anyway to make space in front for the MBR.
So no for now and probably the near future the only option would be to copy the games to a different HDD first.

To copy game to another HDD, do I absolustly need to use the move option in the wiiu, or copy the img of the first hdd to a second would be enough?

 

[SDIO]

you woud need the copy (or move) option in the Wii U Data Management. For some reason the Wii U doesn't like it if you just dd, even if it is the same size. But I haven't tired it yet with USB partition, which have the exact same size (up to the sector). But I doubt it work. Maybe if you use the same SATA to USB adapter, but not sure.

EDIT: maybe if I would disable crypto, you could copy it using the Wii U data management to another partitioned hard drive and then dd the partition. But disabling crypto didn't just work like on the SD when I tried it and I didn't look further into it. So by the time I would have figured that out, you probably would already have it copied through the Data Managment twice anyway.

 

[Xyphoseos]

you woud need the copy (or move) option in the Wii U Data Management. For some reason the Wii U doesn't like it if you just dd, even if it is the same size. But I haven't tired it yet with USB partition, which have the exact same size (up to the sector). But I doubt it work. Maybe if you use the same SATA to USB adapter, but not sure.

EDIT: maybe if I would disable crypto, you could copy it using the Wii U data management to another partitioned hard drive and then dd the partition. But disabling crypto didn't just work like on the SD when I tried it and I didn't look further into it. So by the time I would have figured that out, you probably would already have it copied through the Data Managment twice anyway.

Another thing, I already experienced the transfert between two HDD before, but the wiiu chashed after a few moment in the middle of the transfert. I was suspecting the fact that the second hdd did not had enough power.
If I use two Y-cable, will it be enough to avoid a crash ? I would like to transfert all while I will be sleeping

 

[SDIO]

probably

 

[ber71]

Awesome, the biggest advace in the wiiu scene in a long time.
Question. Since it uses MBR, the 2TB limit applies?

 

[SDIO]

For now the WFS partition has to be completely inside the first two TB.

I could change that part to use 64bit, then you could have a 2 TB partition starting within the first two TB.

If I implement then GPT Support, which I don't feel like right now, you could have a 2TB partition at any location.

On top of that I could add 4k sector emulation it could go up to a 16TB partition at any location.
I could even add larger sector emulation going beyond that

 

[MysticMinion]

Does this work with dumpster u to backup all the games to a pc first?

 

[lordelan]

It's still only been a few days since I we asked for this and I think we thought this might happen in a few years if ever. Yet you already did it.
Unbelievable! Do you even sleep?
Thank you so much for making the Wii U even greater!

 

[SDIO]

I don't think dumpsterU supports Partitions. And even if it can only extract, but not copy back.
You can use wfs-extract directly t extract from the Partition

 

[Litle_Bird]

Amazing work! SDIO you're doing an amazing contribution to the Wii U scene! Thank you!

 

[Xyphoseos]

hi again, I created the two partition on my hdd (both logical since i don't want to use sd emulation) while I plug the hdd on the wii u, it does not ask me to format the hdd. So I go in setting and format, now my wii u is verifiing the hdd, idefinitly visibly. Any idea?

EDIT: Both partition were logical, I misread both need to be primary...

 

[alcab]

This is amazing! Thanks a lot!! It even works in combination with the sdusb plugin, so you can use your USB HDD as a store for your Wii U games, and transfer the ones you want to play to the max endurance SD card!! Bravo!

Unfortunately, I've realized I have a small problem when using the new USB Partition plugin. When turning off the Wii U from vWii mode or the configuration menu, the console gives a black screen, but doesn't turn off. The white light is still on, instead of the red one.

Thanks a lot!

EDIT: I think it was a problem with my USB HDD!

 

[ColdBlitz]

I have an HDD with all my wiiu game. Is it possible to resize it to include a FAT32 partition without lose any game?

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

 

[yamaharacer]

Could someone explain me how I get this to work? I have formated everything like explained.
Used Manjaro partition manager, first partition fat32 primary, second ntfs primary, everything mbr.
Putted the wafel_partition_sd to /sys/hax/ios_plugins shorted the name.

Copyed everything of my sd card to the fat32 partition. The HDD is pluged to the bottom USB port via a Y Cable.

But there is no loading of the hdd. Just starts without loading my aroma files. Tryed 3 different HDDs with different sizes.

What do I wrong?

 

[SDIO]

You have ISFShax already setup? And you copied it to the SLC and not the SD?