so a few months ago i was wanting to set my Wii U up again. i put my SSD into my SATA to USB drive enclosure and plug it into the system. formatting goes well, and soon enough i’m installing some smaller games. then i decide to add Xenoblade X to the queue. it starts downloading really slowly, i think nothing of it cause in general the Wii U’s internet is pretty shit. a while later, i get a black screen with an error.
There is a problem with the USB storage device.
i reboot, the drive and the games on it no longer show up on my Wii U menu.
attempting to format from System Settings makes the system tell me it’s convinced there’s no drive connected.
i try putting the drive into my laptop, the laptop can no longer complete its POST.
as soon as i disconnect the drive and reboot, it POSTs normally and tries looking for a way to boot an OS.
oh well, the drive was only 128GB anyway. i should have listened to the people warning others not to use solid state media on a Wii U to store games.
so i leave the Wii U alone for a while cause i have no money and don’t want to install games onto the MLC (i have a 2012 system with a Hynix MLC). a while later, i get some money back that i let someone close to me borrow. i use it to (amongst other things) buy a 500GB WD Black mechanical laptop hard drive with a USB Y cable to properly power it from the system. said Y cable turns up really quickly, the hard drive however took a bit longer to arrive. when it did finally arrive though, i was impressed with the packaging. it was packed really well (which really it should have been because it was a mechanical drive but for the £8 i paid for it i honestly expected worse).
first things first, i put the drive into my laptop and boot from a USB that had on it a copy of ShredOS. that took about 6 hours but now i can rest easy knowing that whatever was previously on that thing was very likely gone now. next, it came out of my laptop and into the drive enclosure. that got connected to my Wii U and i started the format. i installed all my game backups on it, that went well. i go onto the eShop to try and redownload my copy of Xenoblade X. it’s not there. i suppose that’s what i get for buying a grey market key on eBay. time to buy a physical copy!