Hacking WBFS Manafer

[angus528]

I have a USB drive that had previously been formatted with WBFS Manager and had about 70 games on it. The WBFS partition was mistakenly deleted, a new raw partition created, and then formatted back to WBFS using WBFS Manager 3.0.

Is there any way to recover the game ISOs from drive? Normal recovery programs will not recognize the WBFS file system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks everyone!

 

[Benjay]

well , i guess you're screwed...

 

[madtamski]

Sorry man, but as Benjay stated you are most definately sol

Even if it wasn't WBFS and the partition was deleted and then re-formated, you'd find it really difficult to recover.

It sucks to be you, sorry.

 

[angus528]

Actually Dack set me straight and I am pretty sure i have recovered all the games. WBFS mgr lists them again, just need to test it on the WII.
Here are the instructions he gave me;
What you need to do (theoretically) is:

1. Get a hex editor that can handle hard drive partitions. e.g. HxD http://mh-nexus.de/en/
2. Search for "WBFS" - this will probably be at sector 63 or 64
3. Change the 0x00's from byte 12 onwards to 0x01 for however many games you have on the disc.
4. thats it

You can find out how many images you have on there by looking at the successive sectors and counting the disc titles you find.

The first 12 bytes in the partition sector are:
"WBFS"
4 bytes of partition size
4 bytes of housekeeping (size of sector, size of wbfs sector, two pads)

The rest of the sector is the usage table and thats what you need to change.


Worked like a charm so far