Hardware How does a Wii U FS formatted partition appear in windows?

[Julizi]

Hey guys,

right before the release of the switch I decided to copy all of the content of my Wii U's hard disk to a smaller one to use the other one for other things. Unfortunatley, I forgot to which HDD I copied the files and now got two HDDs here but I don't know which one holds the old Wii U files. The problem: The Wii U does not recognize both of the HDD although of them has to be Wii U formatted, also Windows does not find any file system on the HDD. So, my question is: How does a Wii U file system does appear on Windows (in the disk management) and is there anyway to rescue the obviously lost Wii U FS partiton?

I am excited for your expertise!

 

[godreborn]

probably unallocated memory or nothing (require initializing). if you initialize the drive, then the wii u will force a format of the drive. I think there's a way around it (at least with a ps3 hdd in the same situation -- initializing), but it's a pita.

 

[CORE]

Im sorry to say but you may have lost everything by even putting it into PC and initialize file system gets messed up and now WiiU wants to Format because Windows setup drive for Format on Windows.

 

[godreborn]

I think there's a way to fix it, but I'm not entirely sure of all the details. it involves cloning the drive, then injecting the first several sectors of a wii u formatted drive. tbh, I don't know if this works for the wii u, but it does for the ps3. 3141card knows how to do it. I read his explanation, but that was a long time ago.

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I forgot that you need to be able to decrypt the hdd, so superslims don't work. I don't think there's a way to do that with wii u formatted disks.

 

[godreborn]

this sort of thing happened to me, so I lost all saves. I've gotten all of my saves back by going through the games again except for super mario 64. those 100 coin runs are brutal.

 

[RandomUser]

I'm not sure, but if my memory is correct, you need a correct dump of opt.bin and seeprom.bin. Even then I do not know how you would access the drive from PC, but if there is a way to restore those two dumped files to the Wii U, it might be possible for the Wii U to access the drive again.
Or maybe this could help, however the correct opt and seeprom files maybe needed.

 

[godreborn]

yeah, I think it has to do with the seeprom. I've messed with the otp before, and it can decrypt the wii u and vwii software partitions. I don't know how it factors in with the mlc (internal storage) or usb. I can't decrypt the mlc at least with just the otp.

 

[Julizi]

I have a seeprom.bin and an otp.bin of my console from when the HDD was still plugged in. So I try to create a full image of both HDDs with Win32DiskImager and try to decrypt them with wfsdump.

 

[godreborn]

I don't know. if you can decrypt the hdd, it can probably be fixed. decrypting the hdd is one thing I've never tried to do. I just figured that if my hdd were to die or something that I could just redownload everything. I have a backup copy of my saves:

and I made a txt file of all games I bought or pirated:

 

[RandomUser]

yeah, I think it has to do with the seeprom. I've messed with the otp before, and it can decrypt the wii u and vwii software partitions. I don't know how it factors in with the mlc (internal storage) or usb. I can't decrypt the mlc at least with just the otp.

I just realized that I called it opt instead of otp . Huh, it should be possible with otp alone, but then again I haven't tried to extract anything using the tool .

I have a seeprom.bin and an otp.bin of my console from when the HDD was still plugged in. So I try to create a full image of both HDDs with Win32DiskImager and try to decrypt them with wfsdump.

I think it is a dumper, not a direct HDD decrypter, so you will need a way to attach that image as a physical drive, even so it may not be possible since it isn't physical. The utility I think just dumps the files from the encrypted Wii U drive.
So you will need space on your PC to dump the files to a saved location. Another USB drive should work that is already preformatted for general PC usage.
You may be able to use FiraDisk driver to mount the image as an emulated physical drive, even though it is mainly used for complete OS booting completely in RAM. It can be used to mount images without booting into RAM. Although not exactly user friendly. The caveat is TESTSIGNING mode is required if you do not want to disable driver signature enforcement on startup.