Homebrew What's the best way to clone a wii-formatted drive into a larger drive?

[Taleweaver]

(NOTE IN ADVANCE: the title is meant to say "what's the best way to clone a wiiu formatted drive...". This was an error on my behalf).

Here's the thing: I've used a 500GB USB drive with a Y-component cable thus far. It worked, and though It's kind of sparse, I managed to get all the wiiu games onto it that I wanted (barely).

The "problem" is a typical first world one: now that script allows injecting wii and gamecube games, I want to expand. At first, I thought a second 500GB (also on Y-component) drive would do the trick, but I quickly noticed that unplugging and replugging the drive causes all programs to be put at the root instead of in the folders I've created. Plus...I don't really want the mess of having to swap hard disks in the first place.

However, with this many gigabytes, copying becomes quite a hassle. The hard drive itself has about 25 GB free on it, but moving individual games/programs onto it, and then on a larger disk takes ridiculously long.

Hence this question: is there a way to clone the 500GB drive onto a 1TB one (so I still have 500GB of wiiu filled stuff to fill)? Is there a way to connect two USB drives at the same time? (meaning: plugging the power-part of the component cable into the wall instead of the other USB drive) Is there a way to dump the content of the drive on my PC and from there on that other drive?

Or, in short: What's the fastest way to get everything from my 500GB wiiu formatted drive onto a likewise formatted 1TB one?

 

[RHOPKINS13]

You should probably change your title to say "Wii U-formatted drive."

There's really no quick way of doing it, you might be able to clone the drive to another one, but I don't think the Wii U will recognize the added disk space without reformatting it. And no partition managers are able to read and resize Wii U partitions, so you're out of luck.

You have two USB ports on the front of the Wii U as well as two USB ports on the back, you should be able to hook up both drives simultaneously.

You can also use a USB hub with your Wii U. Make sure to get one that is powered, because the Wii U's USB ports likely won't be able to power it otherwise.

 

[xdarkmario]

if you have 2 Y splitters you can just connect both and transfer all at once using the built in wii u app transfer. Otherwise theirs nothing but your wii U can read your hard drive as its locked and signed to your wii U.

 

[xs4all]

You can plug in TWO external HDD's to the WiiU, making sure you have enough power to power both up, the difficult part would be if both your external drives is using the Y cable.
If this is the case, I suggest you use the back ports for the main usb plugs for the HDD's, and as for the second usb plugs which supplies additional power to the drives, if you have a spare laptop handy, you can just use the usb ports to power the drives, but I suggest you find a stable power supply which is not going to turn off on you, why? I will explain below.

Now, you wont be able to use both drives at the same time, only one will show up, you will need to go to the DATA MANAGEMENT options menu, from here both external HDD will show up, allowing you to copy the games from your old drive to the new drive. I never tried but I think you can plug in the second drive at the DATA MANAGEMENT options menu, instead of plugging both at the same time.

Be warned if your original drive is almost 500GB, the transfer will take ages! My original drive was a 750GB with about 650GB worth of data, my new drive was a 2TB drive with external power supply, I did this ages ago but I remember it took 10+ hours to copy everything from the old drive to the new drive. Not sure what transfer speeds it was copying but it was sure slow!
When the files are being transferred to the new drive, fingers crossed you don't have a power outage or someone accidentally turning off the power, that will be not good!

WiiU uses it's own format/file system so you want be able to read it on your PC, if you do plug in a WiiU formatted HDD, windows PC will want to format the drive. I don't think CLONING one drive to another with cloning tools will work as I believe when the WiiU formats the drive, it records the MBR or Serial number of the HDD and ties it to the system. Even if the cloning did work, your just cloning a 500GB from one to another and the cloning app will not know what to do with the remaining free space as it's Nintendo's file system, as I assume if the cloning did work, the WiiU will just see the the 500GB partition on the 1TB drive you have.

Small price to pay of you want a bigger drive, I would not want to install everything from scratch again, that part was the longest, even though I had a 128GB SD CARD to do all my installs, this still took ages.

 

[Taleweaver]

Okay...I feel stupid: I completely forgot that the wiiu had two USB ports in the front as well.

In any case: thanks for the replies so far. At least I know there's no faster way than letting it run all night (which I somewhat anticipated, going by transfer speeds. But now at least I don't have to swap drives every so often like the world's slowest DJ ).

@RHOPKINS13 : you're undoubtedly correct (it was a spelling error). But I see no way to edit the thread title, so I guess I'm stuck with it.

 

[RHOPKINS13]

At least I know there's no faster way than letting it run all night (which I somewhat anticipated, going by transfer speeds. But now at least I don't have to swap drives every so often like the world's slowest DJ ).

Having both drives hooked up simultaneously should help a lot, you should be able to transfer everything from one drive to the other without moving it to your internal storage first.
http://en-americas-support.nintendo...-to-and-from-a-single-external-storage-device

 

[Taleweaver]

Phew... That proved to be a whole lot harder than i thought. I think I've plugged that y-cable in all possible ways in all slots. Having a self powered USB drive next to it appeared to block access to anything else. In the end, both data cables are in the back usb ports while the power comes from my pc next to it. And even then, it may have been that i turned on the self powered drive after going to the data management page. In any case: it's moving the first of the two smaller drives to a large one. Aside a power outage (only happened 3-4 times in 5 years here) I'll be all right.

Thanks again for the advice.

 

[xs4all]

Having both drives hooked up simultaneously should help a lot, you should be able to transfer everything from one drive to the other without moving it to your internal storage first.
http://en-americas-support.nintendo...-to-and-from-a-single-external-storage-device

Didn't I mention in my reply that you can transfer from one drive to another?

Oh, and thanks for linking to the support page on how to do this, I think not many people know how to do this

 

[plyscho]

There were threads about this long ago:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/cloning-wii-u-usb-hdd.445982/
https://gbatemp.net/threads/cloning-wii-u-hdd.448971/

In short: You can't clone WiiU drives, your only option is to copy everything over to the new drive.