Topic: Using Wii U Without USB Drive

So I have a Wii U with a 2TB USB hard drive hooked up to it, and I'm bringing the Wii U and Smash Bros on a trip with me this weekend. However, to save packing space, I want to avoid taking the hard drive.

Question is, what happens when you turn on the Wii U without having your USB hard drive attached? Can you still use it, but just not access the stuff that was on the USB drive? Does the Wii U get completely screwed up?

Nothing gets screwed up. If your data for those games are on USB than you just won't have access to that data if the drive is not there. You might be surprised what data is where if you haven't checked it yourself.

You can go to data management in settings and move things from internal storage to USB and vice versa but it is honestly kind of a slow tedious process.

Those are the tradeoffs your looking at if you want to leave USB behind....hopefully your internal memory isn' completely full as to make games unable to save without the drive.

You don't need to take your hard drive, the WiiU runs fine without it. Anything you have stored on your hard drive will be fine.
All you need to do is go into the settings, then into data management. From there you can check what's stored on the WiiU internal memory and what's on your hard drive. You can copy or move data to the WiiU internal memory from your hard drive, and you can do the same again from the WiiU memory to your hard drive.
Just move anything you want to play onto your WiiU internal memory.

Thanks everyone. I left the hard drive at home and brought the Wii U and Smash Bros, making sure all the Smash Bros data was on the internal memory, and everything worked perfectly!