Hacking Wii U USB W10 PC Disk Initialize, now inaccessible?

[andybarrn]

I connected the USB drive I had connected to my WII U to my Windows 10 PC, and it asked to initialize the drive when I accessed it in "Disk Management", I stupidly did, and now the drive is inaccessible when plugged into the Wii U. It just asks me to format the drive. Is there any way to resolve this. I saw some previous posts about possibly replacing the first 64 bytes on the drive to recover the partition information, but have been testing with some other drives before trying on my initialized drive and haven't had much luck. Any suggestions?

 

[Hayato213]

Look like you need to use DD to write the first 64 bytes from a donor drive that have the partition header. Or you can use Acronis Disk Director or any other tool that allows you that write directly to the physical disk structure starting from sector 0.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/view-wii-u-partition-on-pc.416659/

 

[godreborn]

Same thing happens with ps3 hdd. It's the first sector that causes this to happen.

 

[andybarrn]

Thank you for the replies, and that is the post I was trying to use when I ran into this problem. So I tried that and perhaps I'm just doing it wrong, but I don't seem to have good results. I'm currently making a backup with dd of the original drive that had an issue in order to save it in the future. However, In the testing that I'm doing I'm doing the following steps, and run into the following issue, perhaps you can see what I'm doing wrong:

Step 1: Place a 64GB USB drive into the Wii U. Format drive with Wii U.
Step 2:Take drive and attach to Linux machine and run the following command "dd if=/dev/sdd of=/home/user/wiiu64bytetest64 bs=64 count=1". My understanding is that this makes a copy of the first 64 bytes of information from the drive when it is formated with the Wii U.
Step 3: Save a game to the USB drive from the Wii U.
Step 4: Insert drive into W10 PC, then initialize drive as GPT, which is the same thing I had done with the originally affected drive. But then do nothing else to the drive but remove from PC.
Step 5: Insert drive into Linux machine and run the following command "dd if=/home/user/wiiu64bytetest64 of=/dev/sdd". My understanding is that this takes those 64 bytes saved earlier and replaces the 64 bytes currently on the drive.
Step 6: Place drive back into Wii U. The Wii U doesn't mention formatting the drive, but it also doesn't show up in storage management in the settings at all.

This is as far as I've gotten with my testing, with no positive results to try and attempt on actual affected drive. Is this what should be working, or am I don't something incorrect, such as the commands or process I'm using?

 

[godreborn]

I'm kinda familiar with how to do this on the ps3 (not the wii u though), but I think the process should be similar if not the same. iirc, the ps3 involves cloning the drive, then formatting the drive on the ps3, then taking the first sector and imprinting on the cloned drive.

 

[godreborn]

here's a post on how to fix it on the ps3 that I remembered: https://www.psx-place.com/threads/solved-ps3-hdd-accidentally-converted-to-gpt-disk.22983/

 

[andybarrn]

@godreborn Thanks for mentioning that post. It mentions that if you initialize with GPT vs MBR, which is what I ended up doing, that it screws up the first 6 sectors of the drive. I'm assuming with that in mind my drive is pretty well gone as far as the games and saves currently on that drive. At least lets me know to cut my losses and just move on.

 

[piratesephiroth]

You formatted the drive,
So that's it, your data is gone.