Hacking Emulation Gaming Hardware Homebrew Wii U Failed to load Payload.elf

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Sailence

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Hello, I have a homebrewed Wii U and this morning I inserted my SD Card (Sandisk 256GB Extreme microSDXC) and downloaded a single Wii U game to test if it works and it worked just fine, afterwards I tried adding a wiiu/ios-plugins folder for more testing to see if I could use it, but trying to put the SD Card in gave the error failed to load payload.elf even though it worked just fine the last time I put it in and didnt tamper with any of those files, so I removed ios-plugins as it was the only thing I changed, and put it back in over 20 times, none of the times it worked, I tried EVERY internet solution I can find including: blowing on it, Ensuring homebrew launcher had proper files, reinstalling payload.elf, and installing the version of payload.elf that has fw.image loader included (from aroma.foryour.cafe/). Nothing works. I tried testing if it was that my SD Card wasnt reading, so I went to my wii menu and opened up homebrew launcher which made me think the SD was reading but then I tried opening USBLoaderGX and it didnt give me the option to press B to read from SD and when it was open it said the storage was something super low like 0.003 which leads me to think the SD didnt work, but I dont know. If anyone has any suggestions I would be truly grateful, thanks.
 
Last edited by Sailence,
Try a different SD card and make sure the card slot is clean. Worst case is the card slot is kaput.
 
Try a different SD card and make sure the card slot is clean. Worst case is the card slot is kaput.
Thank you for your response, problem is for me is that I dont have any other SD Cards and the one im using I bought yesterday. I've also done some testing and when my SD Card is out of the Wii U and I go the Wii menu I can open the homebrew launcher but nothing shows up, and then when opening UsbloaderGX it crashes, when the SD Card is in the Wii U and I go to the Wii menu the homebrew launcher's apps still show up and UsbloaderGX opens but is bugged because it says 0.03 memory, and the Wii U itself doesn't display any homebrew application's only the Wii menu does. I'm thinking its either partially reading the SD Card, or its a problem on the SD Card itself, but I don't know how to find out which is causing the issue.
 
I'm not sure if this will help anyone but I'm dealing with this issue right now. After trying to redo a retroarch tutorial I reformatted my sd card using 32k allocation size. The sd card worked before that so I'm going to revert and see if that helps. Also make sure it's formatted as FAT32. I'm not sure if other formats work at all.

I also changed the drive label (not the drive letter) to GAMES_SD. Also not sure if that ruined anything.

Final Edit: Changed from Logical to Primary and it fixed it.
 
Last edited by handy333,
I get this error often, for me it's the SD adaptor, Idk what it is but it seems when using a micro SD with an adaptor the Wii U sometimes fails to read it, it's like they wear off from use, replacing the adaptor with a new one usually fixes the issue if only temporarily.
 
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