Hacking Wiierd Wiikey Issues...... Maybe?

[mantacer]

Hi all Wii Hack Gurus,
In Nov I had a professionally installed Wiikey and was playing all B/Up games perfectly. Out of the blue it has stopped playing a majority of these games ?
I get the 'Wii is unable to read the DVD, turn off and refer to manual' error
I have 3.3E and over the weekend I used the Wiikey 1.9 recovery disc and then updated to 1.9s which didn't change a thing. (I have read there is no way to check if the wiikey has been updated and also that while flashing does not indicate it in anyway ?)
I have the homebrew channel installed with Gecko OS 1.07, I used ImgBurn and Verbatim DVD-R for all burns with a write speed of 2.4x to try and reduce coasters.
Out of about 15 games, only Mario Kart and WWE 2009 have continued to work, plus my originals. All the games are scrubbed pal versions. I have yet to try reburn a game or download a full version to see if thats the issue.
Does anyone have a suggestion I could try as I have searched the forums and forgive me if I missed something, but could not find where only 'some' of the back ups have stopped working, usually it was all or nothing ?
Thanks in advance for any help you could offer.

 

[pintscc]

Try reburning one of the unworking games at 6X and see if it works.

 

[BBking83]

See if you can downgrade to 3.2 or 3.1.

There are some tuts on here.

 

[mantacer]

Thanks for that guys, I am reburning a game as we speak, as I am sure downgrading is a bit of a task. If the reburn does not work will have to look at it for sure, will update once I have tried.

 

[mantacer]

Well I ended up doing both suggestions and it seems the reburn is the one doing the trick, although i am glad I did downgrade. Has anyone had discs just stop working ??? I have never known discs just to go bad after the fact!
Have only done one so far, but it worked so hopefully the other 12 or so will do to, cheers for the quick replies.

 

[wiigee]

also you could try cleaning your backups, i found the wii to be very picky with reading discs and any fingerprints etc could cause problems

 

[mantacer]

Cheers wiigee, but the reburn seems to be the only thing working at the moment.
Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[lll]

You might like to pick up a official Nintendo Wii cleaning kit - they're available in most shops that sell Wii games. I've seen them in Kmart and Dick Smith at least. RRP is $9.95.

Reburning probably works because you're getting a better quality burn. I've found that Verbatim 16x -Rs burn best at 8x or 12x, depending on the drive. Burning at the slowest speed possible is a bad idea unless you've got a good reason to do otherwise.

Maybe the problem was that you had a crappy burn and then wear and tear/gradual degradation/dirt/fingerprints pushed it over the limit and the Wii refused to read it.

 

[mantacer]

To be honest I do not know much about what makes a good burn, I was under the impression the slower the burn speed the better the burn and the less chance of errors.
Initial researching from a number of sites I read that ideally a 4x burn is what is accepted as the recommended speed for minimal fails.
This is all good info for me and hopefully others, as for informations sake I am using a HP Laptop to do all my burning (could it be the burner itself, although it does do alot of other burns with no issues ?).
Now that I have so many pretty coffee coasters, I am hoping it was the burn speed so I don't run into this fail rate in another month or so.
I assume at the price the cleaning kit is only for discs and not for the wii laser, and with some of these games only seeing the light of day for a quick test there was almost no marks on the disc face whatsoever.
I did the last couple of burns at 6x as recommended by pintscc, so the thought is to maybe pump it up to 8x or 12x?

 

[HaniKazmi]

To be honest I do not know much about what makes a good burn, I was under the impression the slower the burn speed the better the burn and the less chance of errors.
Initial researching from a number of sites I read that ideally a 4x burn is what is accepted as the recommended speed for minimal fails.
This is all good info for me and hopefully others, as for informations sake I am using a HP Laptop to do all my burning (could it be the burner itself, although it does do alot of other burns with no issues ?).
Now that I have so many pretty coffee coasters, I am hoping it was the burn speed so I don't run into this fail rate in another month or so.
I assume at the price the cleaning kit is only for discs and not for the wii laser, and with some of these games only seeing the light of day for a quick test there was almost no marks on the disc face whatsoever.
I did the last couple of burns at 6x as recommended by pintscc, so the thought is to maybe pump it up to 8x or 12x?

The best speed is whatever it says on the dvd.

 

[retiredjerk]

use a pioneer burner and good quality DVD-R like Tayio Yuden. also the wii seems to like cheap riteks as well but i would stick to jap made TY's. if you do those two thing i bet you will eliminate your problem.

 

[mantacer]

Thanks I will check that out !!

 

[mantacer]

use a pioneer burner and good quality DVD-R like Tayio Yuden. also the wii seems to like cheap riteks as well but i would stick to jap made TY's. if you do those two thing i bet you will eliminate your problem.

I have a pioneer burner on my desktop and was thinking I might start to use that for all my Wii burns.
As for the media, again with my initial research I read that Verbatim was the accepted dvd-r used? I might have to check out these Tayio Yuden, this is all new to me.

 

[retiredjerk]

verbatim is great for Dual layer DVD's but for single layer i still say the best is TY. they are around 32 bucks for 100 here in the USA.

 

[mantacer]

Ok will have to do some research, I have to be honest and say I have never seen that brand available locally, I am in a regional town. So if I go that way it would have be an online purchase.
Thanks again for the input.

 

[BBking83]

Okay, glad you got it working!!

So, you have downgraded? Does that mean that the first lot of backed up games still don't work? I understand that bad burns happen but I was getting that exact message 'Wii is unable to read the DVD, turn off and refer to manual' error after I upgraded to get some WiiWare working. About half of my games would not work.

After I downgraded, the message went away and haven't seen it since.

Could you do me a favour? And see if the first ones are still working??

Maybe it was dodgey DVDs, but you said it wasn't working after a while so they did work. Anywayz, good to hear its all good!

 

[mantacer]

To be honest I only checked and reburnt 2 discs last night as I wanted to do a bit more research regarding burning and media types today. *headache*
But the couple I did check would not work after downgrade (Madden 09 and Mario Strikers which after reburn - success!) and Medal of Honor Heroes 2 got to the wriststrap screen and froze.
I will do a bunch this afternoon when I get home from work to see if anymore recover.
How they initially worked and then failed is what had me puzzled as I checked and bit played every single game I burnt and they all worked a treat, but as previously mentioned I have done zero research into burning and whether or not iso images can fade or become corrupt???
I think I will use the pioneer burner and the Verbatims (as I stocked up when they were going cheap) at a higher speed, hopefully they will last longer than a month ???
If you find any other threads that had games work and then fail due to media errors I would be appreciative of a link, because as it stands it does not seem to be the downgrade.

 

[pintscc]

I am really glad my advice is working. The reason I suggested it is that I remember reading on here a while back that recordable DVD's can lose their pits and groves (or something like that I don't know the technical word) over time and the wii will eventually stop reading them. 6X was suggested because the wii reads at this speed, but I have burnt at all speeds. 2X was the worst out of the lot - make an unholy noise in the wii drive too!

Best bet is to use DVD-R and a good brand. Although I have even had the odd problem with verbatims.

You could always run some tests on your blank media with the little program called "DVD identifier" it will tell you the quality of the media (and possibly the best write speed).

Good luck!

 

[mantacer]

I am more glad then yourself pintscc

But even more glad to see that you had seen somewhere that a DVD can lose it's info from a bad burn. I did accept that over time (years) it could happen but a month had/has me scratchin my head.
Thanks again mate.

 

[mantacer]

As requested, I have just finished checking my wii back up collection and I now have 100% failure rate, literally overnight Mario Kart has stopped working and WWE was checked about 5 days ago. Good news is the reburns are still working!