Hacking Wii U titles on external USB missing

[DaXIthR]

Hello, did a search to no avail. Hopefully someone can help.

I use Haxchi, not CBHC. The USB drive is connected with a Y-cable to the console's rear ports. I had no issues a couple months ago, but the system went unplayed due to travel and finals for a stretch. I recently got Darksiders Warmastered and wanted to add that to my USB.

I did so using the USB install method via SD card. When Darksiders was successfully added to the Wii U Menu, over a dozen titles, like Super Mario 3D World, Smash 4, and Bayo 1 which were there previously, no longer show up.

For the record, I have about 3 dozen Wii U games on my external HDD, and half of them have just disappeared from the Wii U menu and are not showing up in the Wii U Memory management tool, either.

Also, interesting is that the system had preserved the empty icons where those missing titles were. So, in the folder, it's not as if those titles were never there, and the present titles are moved to the first available slot.

Hope that makes sense. Anyone have experience with this?

Tempted to switch over to a couple of large flash drives, like a 256GB and a 128GB, if I have to start over with the missing games.

 

[nexusmtz]

Before you start over, try this:
Delete one small game from your USB drive using Data Management.
Shut down
Disconnect the drive
Start up the Wii U with the drive disconnected. You should have empty slots for all the USB games
Shut down
Reconnect the drive
Start up again.

Since we don't have any tools to fix the USB file system, if it's messed up, we can't fix it.If you want to dig a little further, and you're familiar with ftpiiu_everwhere, you could use that to look at your usb's /usr/title directory and see if the games are actually still there.

If you haven't used ftpiiu_everwhere before, then yes, you could copy what's left to flash drives using data management.

 

[DaXIthR]

Thanks for the reply, but no luck.

I'm not familiar with ftpiiu, so I don't think I'll fool around with that at this point, but there is a clear discrepancy when looking at the contents of the HDD in Data Management and the total used space on the HDD. The HDD is claiming over 100GB as used compared to the sum of the items in Data Management. The data/games are all there but irretrievable, I guess.

 

[nexusmtz]

The data/games are all there but irretrievable, I guess.

If you have a lot of time invested in some of the games, you should take a look at SaveMii, which might be able to back up the saves - even if the games are somehow damaged (two different directories).

 

[DaXIthR]

Again, thanks for the help. It didn't occur to me I'd lost the saves. I'll look into this.

Am I right in assuming this is an issue that appears with HDDs and should not be one when I migrate to a Flash drive solution?

 

[nexusmtz]

Am I right in assuming this is an issue that appears with HDDs and should not be one when I migrate to a Flash drive solution?

The hard drive's larger capacity gives it the greater chance of having a problem, but it's not because it's a hard drive, it's just larger, and all your eggs are in one basket.

Nintendo doesn't recommend flash drives, but I've been using one without trouble for months. As for which is better, since we don't know why the games disappeared, we can't know if a flash drive would have been just as susceptible to the problem.

In this case, as with most others involving storage, your best bet is to be ready to recover from a failure. Back up what you care about (the saves) and keep your install files so you don't have to re-rip your discs or redownload if you have to reinstall. It's a pain to have to reload several games, but it's not as bad as losing a game save with many hours into it.

 

[DaXIthR]

The hard drive's larger capacity gives it the greater chance of having a problem, but it's not because it's a hard drive, it's just larger, and all your eggs are in one basket.

Nintendo doesn't recommend flash drives, but I've been using one without trouble for months. As for which is better, since we don't know why the games disappeared, we can't know if a flash drive would have been just as susceptible to the problem.

Got it. It is a 1TB WD, which I'd had for a some time but never showed issues. I knew it was much bigger than I needed in this case but it was lying around. Caught a decent deal on a 512GB Corsair flash drive on eBay and will do the transfer when it arrives next week.

I've got a big ass NAS. EVERYTHING except the Wii U titles (excluded for no good reason) were backed up there. As always, lesson learnt. Pikmin 3 and Smash 4 are the save files I most desperately need to recover.

Thanks again. I'm surprised how rare this whole business of disappearing titles seems to be. where all this stuff is concerned, I feel like I've always been able to find a half dozen troubleshooting tips and tricks. Oh well.

 

[nexusmtz]

It is a 1TB WD, which I'd had for a some time but never showed issues.

Good luck with the transfer. I don't think you'll find anything wrong with the hard drive itself, but you could run WD's 'long test / surface test diagnostics on it even though you can't view the WiiU data. WD would just be looking at the sectors to make sure they're readable. If that passes, you can always wipe the drive and use it on your PC.

I'm a NAS user too (QNAP 669L.) Even with 6x6TB, I'm going to have to start getting picky soon. Movies will go first. I could stream at least half of them, and the other half probably aren't worth watching!

 

[DaXIthR]

Good call on the diagnostics test.

I've got a Drobo 5N (5x4TB), with 7.9TB free. About a year ago, my free space dropped into the 6.XXTB threshold and I performed a massive culling. Got rid of some movies, but mostly anime and sporting events I was never going to watch. I got back to almost 10TB, and since then have put more data on at a faster rate than ever before.

6x6TB?! Holy crap. Sure wish there was a way to check out each other's media libraries.

Anyway, thanks for all the help!

 

[Kingreefer]

I'm having a similar issue minus the fact I never left my system for anytime ...what I did was... I modded the Wii u part and added Wii u games........ then decided to do the vWii part and a few minutes into it..... I somehow managed to delete all the channels ...mine don't show up at all there is no spacers ....but if you check the drive... all the games are still there and the drive is still showing as full.... which leads me to think its only the channel launchers that have somehow been erased and other then installing all them games back..... I am not sure how to get the channels to show back up ..... just for info sake this is on a 250gb drive ...on a powered hub ...i am using haxchi with cbhc ..... if there is a way to fix this id be super interested to know