After I finished my post about modding the Wii waaaaay back in 2015, I promptly put it on a shelf and never gave it another glance. Yeah, that’s how I roll.
Four years have passed and it seems I re-purposed my game HDD. I was itching to play me some Wii, but that would mean I’d have to hunt down my discs, which although ultimately taking less time than re-modding all my Wii (plural Wii is still Wii, right?), is not what I did.
So I had to re-learn the ropes, using the breadcrumbs I’d left myself back in 2015 as a starting point.
Essentially, in a nutshell–if your Wii is already modded, then find sysCheckHDE (I used 2.40), which is newer than sysCheckGX, which in turn is newer than sysCheck. Plus it also works on WiiUs (clearly this plural gets an ‘s’, amiright?) Run that on your Wii and take the .csv it creates and drop that onto ModMii. ModMii will tell you what you need to do to update, and if necessary, un-screw your system. It downloads everything needed and even creates an .html instruction book for you. Amazing stuff.
I also learned that being on system 4.1 is fine, as 4.3 (final) is essentially 4.1 with added anti-modding measures added.
Your HDD should be formatted as FAT32, preferably 32k clusters, and set as the active partition. You can download EaseUS Partition Manager and dodge their bundled software to accomplish this (I got all fancy and tried CLI diskpart first, but clearly I mucked that up as it didn’t work)
Use Wii Backup Manager to transfer your games to your HDD. You can use Configurable USB Loader (78.11) to act as a front-end for both Wii and Gamecube games–the later calling upon Nintendont to do the heavy lifting. I couldn’t find a bundled Nintendont, and had to hunt down and rename a few files to get that one up and running.
Only took me a few hours and that 5 minutes of Ikaruga was so worth it. Now the Wii go back on their shelf.