Loading Wii games from a USB drive

There have been a recent rash of people posting instructions on how to add USB drives to their Wiis.  This is something I was very interested in, but in all of the posts I’ve seen recently, none of them seem to fully address the issue.  None of them seem to go into any detail on what to do if things go wrong.  Performing this mod is not for the faint of heart.

In my case, I first started following the directions here:  Kringg.com

It’s very light on explanation, just giving steps to follow, which made me think it would be a very straightforward process.  Truth be told, it is, but there are some gotchas along the way.

Following those instructions seemed to go smoothly until I got to the point that I was actually ready to Rip my collection of games.  When I attempted to do that, I got crash after crash, no matter which game I tried.  I had two USB drives to try and both had the same failed results.  And while parts of the installation when fine via the network connection, later I was unable to get to the network from the WAD manager.  I later determined that the problem arose when I attached the USB drive.

I had an alternative way in mind from the beginning: mikeandheth.com

Unfortunately, this did not overcome any of my issues.  The crashes continued.

At this point, I was wondering if these software mods to my Wii were doing something to break my Wii.  So, I tried running Zelda.  To my surprise, the Wii did not see my Zelda disk at all.  I ejected it and re-inserted it and was relieved to see that it finally recognized it.

One thing that bothered me about these guides was at just which level of Nintendo software did they expect me to be at when starting?  In searching around, I found some posts saying that you’d have issues if you had some older software installed when you started, so I updated to the latest software via System Update.  That got me to 4.0U (shown on some of the Wii settings screens).

I then followed this post: gbatemp.com

I used the “Offline Downgrade/Upgrade” procedure.  Since I still had the homebrew channel installed from my first attempt, I only performed steps 1 – 3, A, B, and 9 – 15.  The scariest part was step 11, where you have to install 18 WADs in sequence.  Note the item “If WAD Manager freezes during installation just try again from the WAD it froze on.”

Well, it froze on me.  A couple of times.  And just after finishing one WAD installation, it crashed.  But, true to the instructions, I rebooted, and picked up with the failed WAD (except the crash, since it had completed that WAD first, so I didn’t reselect it).  Each time, on the second attempt at installing the WAD, it completed just fine.

One appendix to these instructions – After installing the pre-loader (step 13) and rebooting, the pre-loader comes up by default.  There is a setting to make it boot to the System Menu at startup.  Set that, then I assume the “Hold Reset” while starting will cause it to go into the preloader (though I haven’t tested that).  Also, in my case, I didn’t have to do step 15.

After going through all this, I had determined that part of my problem was with my network connection.  I use a wired USB adapter, and found that when I when to “download missing covers” from the USB loader that I got a crash.  So, off to using wireless I went.  So far, so good.

Last night, the kids played Mario Kart and Wii Sports, and everything worked just like always.

One potential caveat to using this method is found a bit down in the post:  “If you want to load games from the disc channel you must install CIOSCORP”.  Well, I haven’t done this yet, and I haven’t tested to see if I could still play games directly from the disk.  But I’m not terribly concerned, as the games seem to be working well from the hard drive.  I’ll probably undertake this, if I find that some games don’t run properly from the USB drive.  (I’ve read that some don’t)

Edit:  Since this original post, I have successfully ran a game directly from the disc with no problem.  Since I updated to the original 4.0U software before undertaking the “Offline Downgrade/Upgrade” procedure, I didn’t expect this to work, as my Wii should have been a clean slate at this point (except for the HomeBrew channel).   Back to the original post:

Anyhow, take it from me – this mod is not for the faint of heart.  I see the advantages in that my kids aren’t likely to break the Wii’s mechanical parts, but it sure was a pain to install.