Topic: Wii U can’t recognise my USBhard drive with all my games on it!

My hard drive has been working fine up until it randomly asked me to format it to use it. I have not done anything to it and I have verified that it is in perfect condition. I don’t want to format it and lose years of save data. Is there anything I can do?

WiiU Hard drive or external hard drive ?

@Cobalt External

@DreamyMario

Official games on it ? I mean no custom firmware etc... or... ?

I only have official games and save data on it. Nothing else

@DreamyMario

1st : try to unplug everything, when I say everything, it's everything ! Power, hdmi, usb etc...
Let everything unplugged for at least 15mn.
Replug everything and try to use your HDD with your WiiU like you did before.

Case 1 : it works ! Perfect everybody is happy !

Case 2 : it doesn't work so let's try this :
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/04/guide_improve_your_w...

Hope it'll help. ^^

Thanks I will try this @Cobalt

I tried both of these and it didn’t work if it helps I am using a Y cable for my HDD and the exact error message I get is You have connected a USB storage device that has not been set up for use with this console. Do you want to format this device so that it can be used with this console?

Thanks for trying your best to help me @Cobalt

I'm sure you've already checked this, but the saves automatically save to the Wii U base with, at least on mine, only game downloads saving to my external drive. So deffo check the Wii U base. If the saves are there then it's likely you will have to redownload your games after formatting. Yes, this can take days but I was just thankful that I still could get the games. And going forward, and this is the kind of advise everyone hates after the horse has bolted, as saves use up little memory, these should be always be kept on base unit. Any ways, good luck.

@Sakura7 Thanks for the advice but I moved all my games to the HDD after downloading them to the system memory because I got it afterwards. In future though I will always put save data on the base hard drive

Are you sure you didn’t change Wii U console? If yes, you should be aware that game files and the Nintendo account lock to specific console serial number.

@TheCurator I have always had the same Wii U and the hard drive was already formatted to it. But it wants me to format it again but doing that will make me lose everything D:

I see but it sounds crazy. It shouldn’t be happening.

@TheCurator I know it really annoys me. What happened is all my games just disappeared except smash (which is on system memory) When I went into data management it asked me to format the hard drive

But you still have the saved files correct?

I have the save files on the USB drive which I cannot access because it randomly needs to be formatted again

Omg, but someone above said that the saved files are also stored on the Wii U?

Yeah I might have moved them to the USB drive before it stopped working. I kinda regret that now

In the digital age, information storage technologies are constantly being improved. Mechanical hard drives are being replaced by solid-state drives, with which no hard drive can compare in speed and power. However, SSDs, having appeared a long time ago, have not yet displaced their seemingly hopelessly outdated counterparts. Most computers, as before, are equipped with "traditional" hard drives, and there are reasons for this. In addition, you can always recover information using services that deal with DATA RECOVERY.