Wii USB Loader

Supported Games

• Gamecube games are NOT supported.

howto: backup and boot games from a USB drive

Requirements:

• Newest Homebrew Channel installed
• This file pack (v1.1+IOS rev 9)
• The original IOS36-64-v1042.wad file (GOOGLE!)

Preparation:

1. Extract the usbloader.rar file into the root of your SD card.
2. Stick the IOS36-64-v1042.wad file into the root of the SD card.
3. Boot the Homebrew Channel, run the IOS installer
4. Select "WAD Install", it should install automatically
5. Reset Wii

Operation:

1. Insert a USB drive into the Wii
2. Boot the homebrew channel, select USB-LOADER

When a virgin USB drive is connected the USB loader will prompt you to format the drive and select a partition.This WILL erase everything on your USB drive, so be sure to back it up.

Your USB drive will be formatted to a file system type WBFS. WBFS is not readable under Microsoft Windows. You will be able to convert it back to FAT later.

1. Choose your partition and continue.
2. Insert the game disk (original or backup) into your Wii, and press the + button.

You can load the Wii game image to your USB drive from the Nintendo Wii using USB Loader. You can also do it from your PC under MS Windows using, among other tools, the WBFS tool.

WBFS

Is an acronym for Wii Backup File System.

WBFS will not load in windows by default, it is not recognized by Windows. However, there are tools that will allow image files to be written to the WBFS formatted drive from windows. WBFS manager is one such tool that will transfer an ISO image files to a WBFS formatted drive.

Although the latest USB Loader supports FAT32, the advantage to using a WBFS formatted drive is the reduction in file size the WBFS format allows, as Wii discs are filled with padding data that must be present in the ISO but that the WBFS file system can strip away. This can allow some smaller games to go from a 4.7 GB (4.37 GiB) ISO file to less than a hundred megabytes.

There is a known limitation of 500 total games when using WBFS even if there is additional free storage space on the USB drive.

WBFS Manager 2.5 and 3.0 have bugs and will tell you the games were added to the WBFS drive but they actually aren’t. If you try to add games from the DOS version of WBFS you receive the error "no space left on device (table full): No error".

Is Using WBFS Still Necessary?

The most recent USB Loader supports a USB drive formatted to FAT32. There is even talk of NTFS support. When you use a tool like wbfs_file it will still compress the Wii game down to the more efficient wbfs type, even though it is saving to a FAT32 drive. WBFS Manager can also be used to accomplish this. Keeping your USB drive FAT32 means it can be recognized by Windows.