Hacking Wii wont read discs, can I mod it to use USB HDD instead?

[Chargin]

My Wii wont read discs anymore.
Its out of warranty, it just stopped reading discs one day, every disc gives a read error now.

I modded it today from virgin 4.0 hoping to be able to use a USB drive and copy all my games to that.
But I think Im discovering this plan wont be possible though as I believe I cant get the games onto the USB drive using windows, I dont have Linux.

What could I do?
Ive been able to rip games to my PC from the disc, using a program I found here, but I believe I cant actually copy these ISOs to a USB drive and just expect it to work.
What about people who illegally download? I never pirate games but surely they are downloading to a PC first? or do they just do it straight to the Wii?
Maybe I could get copies of the games I own that way if its the only possibility.

 

[joshed]

If you have the game iso on your pc you can use a WBFS manager copy it to an HDD. There are many, and there are versions for linux, windows, and mac.

 

[Alexrose]

My Wii wont read discs anymore.
Its out of warranty, it just stopped reading discs one day, every disc gives a read error now.

I modded it today from virgin 4.0 hoping to be able to use a USB drive and copy all my games to that.
But I think Im discovering this plan wont be possible though as I believe I cant get the games onto the USB drive using windows, I dont have Linux.

What could I do?
Ive been able to rip games to my PC from the disc, using a program I found here, but I believe I cant actually copy these ISOs to a USB drive and just expect it to work.
What about people who illegally download? I never pirate games but surely they are downloading to a PC first? or do they just do it straight to the Wii?
Maybe I could get copies of the games I own that way if its the only possibility.

http://wbfsmanager.codeplex.com/

Also, can you link to this tool to allow you to rip games through a PC dvd drive? I didn't know there was such a thing, I thought there were just like 2 drives that were able to dump it and they could do it already without programs?

 

[joshed]

I belive there is a wbfs manager that rips games directly to wbfs drive if you have one of those 2 drives.

 

[Chargin]

Well thats a relief, I read a direct post that said "can I rip games using a pc" and someone wrote back saying no, only linux at this stage and that was about a month ago.