What is USB Loader?

 

USB Loaders allow you to rip your own discs to an external USB hard drive and then run them from there. This will minimise load times, generally improve performance and means you can switch which Wii game you want to play without leaving your couch.

 

We highly recommend Configurable USB Loader as it has the most features and the best customisability of the many USB Loaders available.

 

 

Preparing your hard drive

You will install your games onto a partition of the hard drive. As of the v62 series, that partition can be formatted as WBFS, FAT32, NTFS or EXT. It is recommended that you use FAT32, but the choice is up to you. The following sections will provide some info about each format type and why you might want to use it or not use it, as well as information on how to prepare your drive for that format if you do want to use it.

WBFS

This is a format type created specifically for Wii games, however it is no longer recommended. There are slight instabilities when deleting games on drives of this format and you cannot use the partition to store other files (i.e., it can only store Wii games).

There is one minor benefit in WBFS that it supports drives with a sector size of 4k. These drives are very rare, but other format types may not work on these drives.

If you do want to format to WBFS for some reason, you can use the GParted tool to prepare your drive for formatting to WBFS with Cfg.

FAT32

This is the most compatible format type. It can store any Wii games and you can store other files on the same partition if you like. This format type is supported by all operating systems. The only real negative is that it has a file size limit of 4GB. This won't affect games as they are automatically split, but perhaps it might affect other files you want to save on the same partition

Your Wii games need to be installed to either a FAT partition or a WBFS partition on the drive. Most external drives come formatted as FAT32 and do not need to be reformatted for use with the loader. If you wish to format a drive to FAT32, this tool is recommended if you are using Windows (the partitioning application that comes with Windows won't create a FAT32 partition of a large enoguh size). GParted or any other partitioning application can also be used.

NTFS

NTFS is a Windows drive format standard and Windows probably formatted your drive this way if you use it. It allows for large files and is quite fast. Unfortunately, other OSes do not have full compatibility for this format. Also, Cfg has some problems with case sensitivity when using NTFS drives.

If using an NTFS drive, you need to add the following options to config.txt or meta.xml. See the Configurable Options page for information on how to do this.

• ntfs_write = 1
• fat_split_size = 0

You can format a drive to NTFS using most partitioning applications or Windows.

EXT

This format covers ext2, ext3 and ext4 formats. These are the formats most commonly used for Linux systems. These formats have the same benefits as NTFS.

EXT support is currently read-only, so there is no way to write games to the drive except via your PC, making it a poor choice.

Note that ext support is very new (started in December 2010) and there may be bugs.

You can format a drive to an ext format using most partitioning applications or Linux.