Well windows can not read wbfs nativly. You need a manager that can be found in the forums that will read it on windows.

 

It might be worth noting that I have another USB Hard drive formatted in WBFS and that one registers fine in windows so can be used in WBFS manager. And they both work in the Wii.

 

use the disk management feature on your PC. Right click on the partition that you formatted to wbfs, should say local disk, then choose assign drive letter or path. Then just pick any drive letter for it without reformatting it.

That should give you a drive letter and let you choose which to pick in wbfs manager 2.5

 

I had this problem too. Windows wouldn't let me assign the partition a letter and my only option was deleting it. So I deleted the partition, turned it into NTFS so Windows would give it a letter and then used one of the PC tools to format the drive for WBFS and it has worked fine ever since. I had to re-rip my games but that didn't take anywhere near as long as it did the first time.

 

I had the exact same problem as you and this is what I did to fix the problem... I used a program called "partition master 3.5" (freeware) from www.partition-tool.com. Look at the WBFS drive and check to see if it was formatted as a "LOGICAL" or a "PRIMARY" partition.

Bottom line is you have to format the drive as FAT32 and PRIMARY, not as a LOGICAL drive. Then use WBFS manager or WBFS tool to format the drive as WBFS and you will now have a working WBFS drive that is detectable by your Wii and you will have a visible drive letter on your PC. The downside to this though is that you are going to have to erase everything you installed and start over. If the other suggestions didn't work, then use this method as your last resort.