Hacking Can everything be on one SD card for Wii U hacking?

[mulderitsme]

I’m looking into hacking my Wii U now that the store is closed. I did my 3DS a bit over a year ago, so I have some experience, but would by no means consider myself an expert. Looking into guides, I feel like Tiramisu is the option I’m most comfortable with. I also really want to install Nintendont so I can play GameCube games. Here’s where the problem is: from what I’ve been reading, Tiramisu won’t boot without its SD card in the console, but the Nintendont guide I’ve found requires a separate formatted SD card to load/store the GameCube ISOs. Is it at all possible to have all of these things on the same SD card without an increased bricking risk? If not, what would you recommend?

 

[Jayro]

You need an SD card, and some kind of USB storage. I highly recommend a name-brand all-metal USB stick that's USB 3.0, I personally use a Kingston DataTraveler 256GB stick, but a Samsung BAR would work too. The metal dissipates the heat, as the USB storage can get quite warm from use. USB Harddrives tent to have power and sleep problems, and SSDs are kind of wasteful on a Wii U. The USB storage is for installing Wii U games on from the SD card.

But I believe you can use the SD card for Wii and Gamecube games, just like on a Wii. It just needs specific formatting to work as intended. I format my Gamecube partition first at the beginning of the drive as FAT32, with 64KB cluster size. All your homebrew apps, hack tools, etc go on here. Then create another FAT32, 64KB cluster partition for the Wii games. (I use NTFS for my personal Wii partition, just because I hate dealing with split files.)

Additionally, I name my partitions accordingly with an optional autorun.inf and icon files, to make life easier when it's inserted into a PC. But that step is 100% optional.

 

[V10lator]

USB storage can get quite warm

Now guess why it gets warm and why even Nintendo warns about using USB sticks...

Then create another FAT32, 64KB cluster partition

A single FAT32 partition for both, Wii U and vWii works just fine.

64KB cluster

Should be 32 KB:

 

[Jayro]

Now guess why it gets warm and why even Nintendo warns about using USB sticks...


A single FAT32 partition for both, Wii U and vWii works just fine.


Should be 32 KB:
View attachment 363829

64KB works fine though. And sure, a single partition for the OP will work fine, but for me, I like two partitions because I use NTFS for Wii games.

 

[estabravo]

64KB works fine though. And sure, a single partition for the OP will work fine, but for me, I like two partitions because I use NTFS for Wii games.

Hi. can you explain the benefit of using a ntfs/wbfs partition over just the wbfs folder method? Is is better performance? Does the wii u handle reading partitioned sd card volumes fine?

 

[Jayro]

Hi. can you explain the benefit of using a ntfs/wbfs partition over just the wbfs folder method? Is is better performance? Does the wii u handle reading partitioned sd card volumes fine?

I hate using the WBFS partitions, I use the NTFS with WBFS folders so I don't have to split fines, and can easily manage my games on a Windows PC. My Wii handles a partitioned SD card fine, so I don't see why the Wii U would have any issues.