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Thread: Problem with my external HDD and emulator on Wii

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    Default Problem with my external HDD and emulator on Wii

    I have this problem that happened twice. I have my Seagate External usb drive, 250 gig, set up to where I have my roms for emulators and a wbfs folder for wii games I ripped onto the hard drive. The external drive is all formatted to FAT 32. Anyways, it was working well until I went to play the Game Boy Advance emulator. After my daughter was playing a game and we went to stop the game, it went to automatically save the game. When I tried to load another rom, it said error opening directory. Now..all of my roms and wbfs data on my hard drive are not visible or accessible, and it only shows the app folder and a weird file by the name QOOABGPH.o I tried deleting that file but it says it cannot be found in the directory. When I click on properties, it shows that the space of my roms and wii games are still on the drive, but like I said they are invisible and I don't know how to correct this. Any pointers?? Also, I had the GBA emulator to save the game to the usb drive in the save folder of the roms. Do you think that is what caused this? This has happened to me twice now and I would rather not have to reformat the drive and start over for this to happen again. Please help!! Thanks!

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    I have a seagate and sometimes Windows will reassign the drive letters, then my f: drive (external) becomes g: drive then I have to reset the save directory to g:
    verify that this has not happened to you

    the file that you had mentioned sounds like a temp file to me
    perhaps the os is storing the data on your internal drive?

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    It's not as simple as just reassigning the drive letter, when I take the external hdd off the wii and put it on my desktop i still cannot see the files on the external hdd. I can't do anything with the file that pops up either. I really think it has something to do with the gba emulator when it automatically saves after playing a game (which is what happened both times this happened). I redid everything and changed the settings to save to the SD card and not automatically save at all, hoping that will fix the problem. I did that on all my emulators also. If anyone has had this happen or knows for sure how to prevent I'd sure appreciate some advice. Thanks!

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    I haven't ran into this problem before. You say you can't access the files at all. Are you able to at least copy them to your PC? That way you can just format the whole drive and copy the files back over.

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    I used a file recovery program (Power Data Recovery) and was able to recover some of them to my desktop comp. I'm going to back up my wii games in case this happens again. Ripping them takes a bit of time! I don't understand what is happening, which I could know how to prevent it at least.

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    sometimes the difference between Windows XP's NTFS and the external drives FAT 32 system is known to cause problems. You could start by reformatting the drive to be an NTFS drive. Some external drives recommend this system within a manual.

    some authors of certain emulators (as No$GBA) have recommended that users store the emulator within a directory different than the save directory.

    when turning off the external drive, are you using the "safely remove hardware" option of Windows or are you just switching the power on and off? if you just switched the power to off after saving the data then, the external drive may not have finished writing the data.

    I'm just trying to help you not annoy you.

    I've had this happen to me, although not in relation with an emulator. I then connected the (FAT 32 formatted) external drive to a Windows 98 pc and I had discovered a directory entitled "recycler." I had then found several lost files within the "recycler" directory. Perhaps you too could try this.

    I have read troubleshooting articles about emulators and external drives and many people recommend that emulators be installed or unpacked to a different directory than the save directory.

    please keep us updated ...

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  8. #7
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    Once you start using your external to run wii games they will be installed ripping out all the dummy data automaticly so this will save alot of space with some games some using as little as 20MB apx

    Also the lower usb on your wii is the fast usb port, the other being a slower port and will show problems trying to use the other usb port (a warning message about a slow drive, but it's just the port being used).

    Because you are wanting to use the drive with a wii it will need reformating anyway but once in that format it will be unlikly you will get problems with loosing data unless you pull the USB out while it is being used, so just make sure the wii is off before turning off the drive if it doesn't do this automaticly, also make sure when you do use it with your PC that the drive is safely removed when used with PC software to install Wii games i.e. right click on the usb icon in your task bar on the lower right of your desktop (defaut desktop setting) there will be an option saying something like "safely remove usb device" this is very important to USB data devices, because often even though a copy file may of said it is complete, it often isn't.

    Storing your drive is damp area's or next high magnatised things like speakers or even in direct sunlight (it's the heat not evil sun rays) or other high heat area's can also harm data stored on the device.

    The drive itself may be faulty though aswell

    P.S. the above fault sounds like it's an issue with the actual gba emu used, not that I know that emu but have heard of other emu's for consoles doing the same thing, there was an emu made for the PSP that corrupted the file system used on memcards when the rom was closed/emu closed it would make the memcard unreadable or partial data loss, sounds like it's the same problem to me, though this was resovled through the emu development, for emulation progs I would recomend using a seperate device like a pen drive with nothing but emulation stuffs on it or a SD memcard if it's supported with just that stuff on it, so you can protect the other data used, just note that alot of emulation specially on console is in mid development so there may be unforseen bugs in them that can cause this kind of issue, or even worse.
    Last edited by Zorlon; 11th-January-2011 at 11:21.

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  10. #8
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    My emulators for the Wii are actually stored on the SD card in the apps folder. I put the roms on the external HDD so I could have the complete sets right there at my fingertips. I'll continue to trouble shoot, if the same thing happens again at least I have my data backed up to my computer. The GBA emulator is the only one that has done this, I've played the N64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and fcegx and they all worked flawlessly. I'm liking the USB loader as well! Thanks for the advice, i'll let you know how it goes.

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