I'm not sure if any other newbies are in the same boat as me.. I am trying to read up on as much as I can about backing up wii games and trying to learn from a lot of posts... but regardless, I need some help...
So I bought a GDR-8082N to back up my Wii games... I've used RawDump 2.0 and successfully backed up 5 games so far.. thought I experienced a lot of "faulty drive" errors... I just want to know if that is common? For every disc it takes me about 10 tries to get it to start.. Also is it common for discs to take more than 6 hours?
After no success with Rawdump and SSBB, I found that people used friidump 0.4.. I was able to create an iso successfully with that program.. It took 13 hours... and again that seems like a long time to me, but I am new to this so maybe that is standard? Someone tell me..
Also I've heard that torrent files are faster.. I'm trying to figure out the fastest way to back up my wii games.. So i've been on numerous sites to try and learn how to get torrent files. I feel so dumb because I don't fully understand how to get the torrents. I've downloaded bitTorrent and then I've searched on places like mininova and isohunt.. My questions are:
Should I try and get files as close to 4.37gb as possible? because I see a lot of various file sizes ones ranging from 1.0gb - 12gb..
Also, does it matter when it says the number of seeds and the number of leeches? for instance one file with 1 seed and 1 leech - would that be a slower download then a file with 40 seeds and 100 leeches?
My last question - I've noticed some files that when I click on it - for instance Super Mario Galaxy torrent and when bitTorrent opens to "add new torrent" the torrent content is supermariogalaxy.iso -- 4.37gb.... should i only being downloading those torrents.. I'm confused compared to other torrents where I click download but under torrent content- it looks like there are several small files that don't say filename.iso instead say filename.r01 -- 95.3mb, filenamer02 -- 95.3mb, etc.... So i'm confused as to what the latter are...
I know this is a long post... but I have a lot of questions swarming in my head.. so if anyone could help me get some answers I would appreciated it.. thanks..
minninovas good, i use that, takes on average bout 3 hours per game, you want as many seeds as possible as will give faster download speeds, leeches are ppl that download the game film etc then remove it from utorreent so other people cant seed from them.... the problem im having unfortunately is that of the 5 wii games ive burned none of them run on my wii.... im using imgburn.... nitemare
also the smaller files you talk of have been compressed somehow, was asking my mate same question and he reckons when you extract them they go to 4 gigs etc... not tried thius yet, 1st i want my games to run on wii
Alright, like you said its kind of a long post so I'll start from the top.
Its not normal to get constant faulty drive errors when using rawdump, but it does take awhile. 2 - 3 hours is normal for me. And brawl I've never managed to backup successfully, but I've heard it takes 10+ hours so again, thats about normal.
And weather or not torrents are faster depends on your internet connection. If you have a very fast fiber optic connection then you could probably download one in an hour or two. If your stuck on DSL because you're out in the boonies like me then expect an average wii game torrent to take 4 - 5 days depending on size.
And seeds and leechers are very important. Seeds are the people sharing the whole torrent. Leechers are the people sharing part of the torrent and still downloading the rest. The more of both there are the faster the torrent will download. You can actually download a game without ever connecting to a seed if there are enough leechers. Even though each one only has part of the torrent, between them all they have the whole thing.
Anyway, a wii game iso is always 4.37 gigs. Generally they dont compress very well, so just sticking them into a zip or rar doesn't do much. Unless you run a program called 'wiiscrubber' on them first. Wiiscrubber removes the padding or 'junk data' from the disk and replaces it with different 'junk data' that compresses very well. So if you were to download a compressed archive of a simple game like wii play it would only be a few hundred mb, but then when you extract the iso from it it will be 4.37gigs.
Finally, multi-part archives. These are standard rar files that are broken into multiple pieces. They generally have filenames like filename.r01, filename.r02, exc. Sometimes you see them with names like filename.part01.rar, filename.part02.rar, exc. Some people will tell you that you need to join them with hjsplit but there is an easier way. Simply open the '01' file with winrar or 7zip or allzip or whatever program you use to open rar files and then extract the contents normally. So long as all the pieces are in the same folder winrar will handle the extraction as if they were one large file. Sometimes you'll have a bunch of .r01, .r02, .r03 files and at the end theres one with .rar. In that case start with that one.
@rabchef
I'd really like to help you but I need more info. What games are you trying? What region are they? What region is your wii? What firmware is your wii? And how is your wii modded? For starters.
