Help with Wii USB HDD loading issues please...

[Trek]

Hopefully this is the right place to ask for help. I did not see a help sub-forum under the wii heading.

I'm not super desperate but, thought I'd ask anyway, just because its bugging me.

I soft modded my Wii with the HBC and normal ios's everyone recommends (wannokio's 222, 223, 249, or something like that).

Everything works great except booting games from the HDD. I can rip games to the HDD, can view all the files there on the Wii but, can't boot them, it just gives me a black screen.

I've tried USB Loader GX and Configurable USB Loader but, both just freeze at the black screen after trying to boot any game. Those same files can be transferred onto an 8 GB flash drive and boot fine.

I'm just guessing that the HDD isn't compatible with the Wii, even though I can rip games to it from the Wii and views the files with the Wii.

The only things that I have not tried are installing Hermes' 222 and 223 ios's because I just don't think it will help.

It's also hard to determine if my HDD is compatible because it's just a raw drive and a cheap enclosure.

A Western Digital 80GB 2.5 inch HDD (wd800beve) and a Vantec NexStar 3 2.5inch USB2.0 enclosure (NST 260U2) is what I'm using, if it's of any value in troubleshooting.

If anyone has heard of this or has idea's, let me know, it sure would be nice to just keep all of my games on the HDD.

Thanks in advance.

[brikD]

did you use the WBFS loader to load them to the drive?? WBFS Manager

[Dznutz]

Ok I had the same problem you are having, it turned out I had to use Wiiflow instead of gxloader or any of the others.

why? dunno

it works so i dont ask questions search for wii flow

[Trek]

Sorry,

I should have mentioned that all drives are formatted with the Wii's native file system (WBFS).

I asume that WiiFlow is another USB Loader, similar to the other two. I'll try that. Seems like a simple enough thing to try. Thanks.

So, DZnutz, you could also rip games to your HDD from the Wii, and then browse the files and DL covers and what not on the Wii but, could not boot games from that same HDD? And WiiFlow fixed it? OK, downloading now... keeping fingers crossed.

[Trek]

I thought I'd reply to the whole thread so it can be a closed topic.

Thanks for pointing me to WiiFlow but, it did not solve my problem. It did however, prompt me to search for the error message that WiiFlow gave that lead me to the ultimate solution.

It would seem that any of the USB loaders will not be able to boot a game from a HDD if said HDD is not set as a primary partition, where mine was an extended partition with a logical drive. Once I deleted the partition and created a new primary partition formatted with WBFS Manager the games boot up OK.

I would think that this would have come up more often in people troubleshooting the USB loaders. Hopefully this helps some people that have the same issue. Must be a "primary partition" or games will not boot.