Hardware Can you make a Wii U Partition?

[BornInBlack]

More posts and no definitive answers on whether or not partitioned hard drives work. Lovely.

This

I appreciate the enthusiasm but like this guy said, no real answers/ Ive read on different sites that this can and cannot be done, Would test it myself if i could,
Has anyone tried to:
-create an unallocated partition in the 'front' of the drive while keeping a secondary NTFS/FAT based partition in the 'back'
-then allowed the wii u to do its formatting and gone back to the PC to see if all partitions had been re-written?

 

[the_randomizer]

I have a HDD, but it's the one that has my backed up Wii games and since I don't have the patience of wanting to re-rip all them over again, I refuse to use it. Unless someone runs a test to confirm that partitions...well, you get the idea.

 

[jservs7]

This

I appreciate the enthusiasm but like this guy said, no real answers/ Ive read on different sites that this can and cannot be done, Would test it myself if i could,
Has anyone tried to:
-create an unallocated partition in the 'front' of the drive while keeping a secondary NTFS/FAT based partition in the 'back'
-then allowed the wii u to do its formatting and gone back to the PC to see if all partitions had been re-written?

This is what I'd like to know as well since I haven't gotten my Wii U yet.

 

[the_randomizer]

Now you've done it, I have no choice but to use memes

 

[KDH]

I plugged in a hard drive that had, in this order, ~40 GB of empty space, a ~200 GB EXT4 partition, a ~150 GB FAT32 partition, and a ~100 GB NTFS partition with an MBR table to satisfy my own curiosity about this. After the Wii U was done with it, there was only it's own "partition" left. Why did I put it qoutes? The Wii U doesn't use a partition table. If you create a new partition table after formatting the drive for the Wii U, even if you make no other changes, you'll be asked to format it again next time you boot the Wii U. So you will likely never be able to use a partitioned hard drive with a Wii U, barring after market modification of it's OS.

 

[the_randomizer]

I plugged in a hard drive that had, in this order, ~40 GB of empty space, a ~200 GB EXT4 partition, a ~150 GB FAT32 partition, and a ~100 GB NTFS partition with an MBR table to satisfy my own curiosity about this. After the Wii U was done with it, there was only it's own "partition" left. Why did I put it qoutes? The Wii U doesn't use a partition table. If you create a new partition table after formatting the drive for the Wii U, even if you make no other changes, you'll be asked to format it again next time you boot the Wii U. So you will likely never be able to use a partitioned hard drive with a Wii U, barring after market modification of it's OS.

Well ain't that a bunch of bollocks.

 

[DeadlyFoez]

Well ain't that a bunch of bollocks.

How so? That makes sense to me. Please explain yourself.

 

[mysticwaterfall]

I think he's implying that its bollocks that its an exclusive drive to the Wii U. Which is well, what I said would happen.

 

[the_randomizer]

How so? That makes sense to me. Please explain yourself.

Because, my current hard drive is used for backups, emulators, music and other homebrew applications. The fact I have to fork out money for another hard drive instead of using the one I have now (to save money) is asinine. Why partitions can't be used is beyond me, hence my saying it's a bunch of bollocks. Believe me, there are far worse and unsavory adjectives I was going to use.

Spoiler

perhaps the word "sodding"?

 

[DeadlyFoez]

Oh, I thought you were saying that the poster was lying. Honestly, it does not surprise me, I rather expected that, and it is rather reasonable from their standpoint.

 

[BornInBlack]

snip.

Thankyou

 

[the_randomizer]

Oh, I thought you were saying that the poster was lying. Honestly, it does not surprise me, I rather expected that, and it is rather reasonable from their standpoint.

Reasonable? I think it's a pain in the arse.

 

[crono141]

Reasonable in that it protects Nintendo's interests, and is likely the only way they got that sort of feature OK'd with the major 3rd party developers. Would you drop 100 million to develop a game for WiiU, only to have its little bits potentially easily accessible from a connected peripheral? In such a piracy crazy environment, no big studio would greenlight such a thing.

It does suck ass though.

 

[PsyBlade]

Reasonable in that it protects Nintendo's interests, and is likely the only way they got that sort of feature OK'd with the major 3rd party developers. Would you drop 100 million to develop a game for WiiU, only to have its little bits potentially easily accessible from a connected peripheral? In such a piracy crazy environment, no big studio would greenlight such a thing.

What are you talking about?
A hard drive connected to the wii does not access the wii at all, not with a partition table and not without.
And when the harddrive is connected to a device that device can access all data stored on the drive, with or without a partition table.
The only difference is that with a partition table its easier to store other data too.



There actually is way to emulate having multiple partitions.
(My examples use linux since thats what I use but I see no reason why other OS should not be able to do the same with different commands)

Many drives can be set up to appear shorter (Host Protected Area - HPA - see "hdparm -N").
It can be set up to last untill changed again (aka permanent) or till the drive is powered down (volatile).
Before formating you set the permanent visible size to whatever you want to use for the WiiU.
Most filesystems store how big they are. This means you can undo the change once the format is done without the WiiU accessing beyond that range. (Should the WiiUFS not store its size you leave the permanent setting to its WiiU value and instead change the volatile one every time.)
Then you set up the filesystem driver to read only after that point (see "mount -o offset"). (or set up a loop device manually before mounting)
Main disadvantage is that you can't access it from a different device without telling it the specific offset to use first. Which means the drive isn't very portable and you might run into trouble on devices where you don't have full access to its internals.

Changing Wii programs to use a user specified offset shouldn't be hard.
It would even be possible to store the offset in a specific place (eg somewhere at the end of the drive) from where the programs can read it automatically.
That after all is the only thing a partiton table actually is, even if most types stores some aditional information too.

 

[PsyBlade]

Did some more investigating about the "saving the offset in the back of the drive" matter.

If it is possible to utilize the HPA feature described above to use a "short" WiiUfs (I don't plan on getting a WiiU soon, someone else needs to verify it)
then one could actually use a real (GPT) partition table, instead of manually specifieing the offset.

GPT basically has 3 parts: a Protective MBR and a main partition table in the front and a alternate (backup) partition table in the back of the drive.
When booted with the "gpt" kernel option set Linux accepts the GPT even is only the backup is present.
The PMBR and the main table can be absent/invalid. Aditionally they are NOT automatically recreated from the backup.
This means that its possible to have a WiiUfs in the front without harming or being harmed by the GPT.

Since some Wii programs can already read GPT too, it should be even easier to modify them to behave the same.

Of course this degraded GPT needs a special partitioning tool to be created/edited without overwriting the WiiUfs but I could easiely write it if there is need.
Altenativly creating the GPT before limiting the size works too, only editing it afterwards would requiere a special tool.

Will test what windows does with that tomorrow, it's getting a bit late.

 

[crono141]

What are you talking about?
A hard drive connected to the wii does not access the wii at all, not with a partition table and not without.
And when the harddrive is connected to a device that device can access all data stored on the drive, with or without a partition table.
The only difference is that with a partition table its easier to store other data too.

Sure, if you get down to the nitty gritty and want to read the drive by sector, you can read the information. But file types, sizes and names are pretty well obfuscated or lost without a partition table and readable format. Not to mention that many OS's and even motherboard BIOS will attempt to correct unrecognized formatting automatically (see the issues that arise when trying to make your own Xbox360 HDD). Doing things they way they chose to do them makes it a lot harder for people like you and I to access and pick apart the data they have written to the drive. As I said, it serves their interests by making any form of data extraction or cracking all the more difficult.

 

[Wizerzak]

You raise a valid point, but the article you linked to is almost 4 years old. Though you are correct that USB hard drives have faster read and write speeds than most SD cards, you'll see in this more up-to-date article that many current cards average at over 23MB/s read (faster than the Wii U's BD-ROM drive). I agree that they would be wary of this as games run from slower SD cards may experience problems in comparison to those run form disc or USB.

If Nintendo had wanted to allow games to be run from SD, they could have either benchmarked the inserted SD card before formatting or made UHS cards a requirement. As far as I can tell, though, there's no mention of SDXC support, which would limit us to 32GB... not too great when you need to download some 16GB games.

I guess all these factors could have contributed to the decision not to include support for loading games from SD cards.

Also the fact that HDDs are significantly cheaper than SD cards in terms of price per GB.

64GB for ~£40 with SDXC cards
2000GB for ~£60 with HDDs

 

[PsyBlade]

Sure, if you get down to the nitty gritty and want to read the drive by sector, you can read the information. But file types, sizes and names are pretty well obfuscated or lost without a partition table and readable format. Not to mention that many OS's and even motherboard BIOS will attempt to correct unrecognized formatting automatically (see the issues that arise when trying to make your own Xbox360 HDD). Doing things they way they chose to do them makes it a lot harder for people like you and I to access and pick apart the data they have written to the drive. As I said, it serves their interests by making any form of data extraction or cracking all the more difficult.

The only thing I have ever seen to automatically write a partition table is the Winwows Setup routine.
And most people don't install windows that often.

Its the fact that no one knows how WiiUfs works that obfuscates things, the missing partition table has nothing to do with it.
Its not harder to read data from the full drive than it is to read it from a partition.
Actually you could consider it it just an iota easier: you have to type less ("/dev/sdd" instead of "/dev/sdd1" in linux - in windows the difference is a bit larger, 10 letters iirc)



About the degraded GPT on windows
XP does not read GPT at all, and 7 does not like a lone backup GPT table.
Means that someone would need to code something to read it.
But still the degraded GPT is not worse than any other way to record the offset.
(The source of eg trucrypt should contain all code necasary to read a custum patiotion table, set up drive letters for the partitions and have the normal filesystem drivers read them.)
Going deeper into that matter will probably be useless till someone tries the HPA trick.

 

[KDH]

Going deeper into that matter will probably be useless till someone tries the HPA trick.

I could do that. I've got another spare HDD to test with. If I can get the Wii U to recognise it's enclosure....

 

[PsyBlade]

short rundown of how to comprehensively test it (using linux)

PC:
partition with GPT into two partitions - eg gdisk
create a filesystem on the SECOND one - eg mkdosfs
mount, fill with files, unmount
limit the permanent visible area to exclude the second partition - hdparm
(but you don't need to include all of the first partition)
make sure the limit worked - eg disconnect the drive (power too), reconnect and fsck the second partition, it should fail

WiiU: format
PC: unlimit permanent visible area
WiiU: use - everything you can think of - be certain to copy something to it - best fill it up

PC:
boot with gtp kernel option
mount second partition
compare files to originals - eg md5sum