Drive problem

[Cherri83]

I had posted this to the General Discussion forum, but hadn’t had ANY views for several hours, so I deleted my post and put it here. Sorry if this is the wrong forum. Maybe some of you WiiMC nerds will know the answer.

I’ve been using WiiMC for about a month now, since I took my kids old Wii out of retirement. I’ve been using an external hard drive to play movies and videos for the most part. My only [minor] complaint is that it won’t play HD movies, but not a big deal, since it doesn’t have any HD output. I’m very happy with the program. Huge thumbs up.

But today, while I was going to put some files on the drive, Windows wouldn’t open the drive. This happens on three computers, two XP and the other W7, so it has to be the drive itself. It made SOME noise, but not the clicking you’d get from a failure. It’s the noise you’d get when defragmenting the drive, only way I can explain in. On one computer, the drive letter was brought up, but the computer would freeze up if I tried to open the drive.

When I hooked it back up to the Wii, I had no issues at all. It plays everything just fine. I didn’t test every file, but I didn’t find anything other than some HD files that it wouldn’t play. And it didn’t make any noise at all.

Any ideas, folks? There’s a couple of movies I’m anxious to watch.

PS: not a computer newb, still on XP, but have been on PCs since the days of DOS and can generally handle just about any problem that arises. Just not this one. Maybe an explanation of how the Wii reads an NTFS drive might help.

[674]

Hi buddy

I had a problem very similar, if not identical to this. Simply, my HD could not be recognised in XP but was on the Wii. I assume you have checked the obvious (that is that in disk manager the drive has a letter assinged?)

I managed to view my drive by booting Hirens boot CD (google it!) and booting mini-XP. I could not solve the problem with any fixes, in the end I had to reinstall windows.

You may also wish to try USBDeview – this small software allows you unistal drives and other USB devices. Run the software, plug in the drive and see if it appears. Try uninstalling, unplug the drive, plug in again and reinstalling

Good luck!

[Cherri83]

I solved the problem last night.

Although Windows reported a RAW files system [that’s bad], chkdsk reported NTFS [that’s good] and that’s probably the reason the Wii recognized the drive and could play from it. Windows Explorer would only recognize the drive by its drive letter and not its ‘friendly’ name. Disk Manager had also reported it as NTFS and also as healthy. But neither Explorer nor Disk Manager reported the drives size.

I have a couple of ISOs for Hiren’s as well as another one for another PE boot CD, and another but of course, all are on the drive in question.

Running chkdsk /f did not solved the problem, though is seemed to find and correct a couple of errors. I did that immediately after posting in this thread. However yesterday, when running chkdsk /x, which unmounts the drive from Windows, the problem was solved. I don’t see a chkdsk log, so I can’t tell the exact nature of what the problem was, but my guess is that is was a bad partition table. If it were the FAT I doubt that the Wii would have been able to read it at all.

I’m pretty sure this drive is about to fail. Its a 250gb Maxtor, at least 5 years old. In trying to copy files from it, its really slow and reports occasional I/O errors on some files. Fortunately, the media files on it are mostly just backups, but not all the software that’s one it.

[Author]

Posts