How to Extract Wii Games to Your Computer Using a Usb Stick.

This instructable will show you how to rip a copy of a Wii game to your computer using only a USB stick and your Wii, and how to compress it for storage.

You will need several things to make this happen:

Hardware Requirements:
Wii with firmware 3.4 and under.
A Wii with a functional DVD drive.
A computer with a usb port.
A large usb stick or usb hard drive.(8 GB at most for dual layer games.)

Software Requirements:
The Homebrew Channel
Usb Loader 1.5
WBFS manager 3.0 or higher.
7-zip

Other:
Wii game (Bought or burned backup)

(Optional:
I suggest you use a large usb external hard drive for permanent tertiary storage).

Step 1: Rip Game to Usb Drive.

To start please insert your WBFS formatted usb stick into the usb port on the back of the Wii.
Turn on the Wii,go to Menu, and start usb Loader Channel.
The screen will go green for a second and you be in usb loader 1.5.
Use the left and right directional cursors to choose "usb mass storage device" and press "A" on your Wii remote.
You will see your usb drive, what games are on it, and how much space is left. ( I recommend that it should be empty.)

Insert your Wii game into your Wii DVD drive, and press "+" on your Wii remote, then either press "A" on you Wii remote to completely rip the game or press "1" to rip the game without the update partition.
After that it will start the ripping process and display the percentage ripped, size of the ripped file, and the estimate time until ripping is complete.

##Remember that some games are smaller than others and will take a shorter time to rip. A perfect example of this is "Super Paper Mario". Even thought it is on a 4.7 GB DVD, it's only 400MB in size. That means that 90% of the DVD was filled with nothing but zeros.##

Step 2: Extract ISO From Usb Drive to Computer.

Now that you have your ripped files all nice in your usb stick, it's time to extract the iso to your computer.
First, insert your usb drive into your computer.
Next, open WBFS manager 3.0 by double-clicking it.
Go to the drive tab, and choose the drive letter that correponds to your usb device.
Click load.
After you click load, you will see the game you ripped to your usb stick. Click the game once to select it, and click the "Extract ISO" button near the bottom left corner.
A new window will pop up, select the location you want to save the ISO file.
After you select a location, name the file by typing a name in the empty box next to "SAVE".
After you are done naming the file, click "SAVE."
It will take several minutes to extract the ISO.

(WARNING: The ripped ISO size will always be 4.7 GB even though the file stored on your usb drive was probably less than that. But we will correct this in the next step.)

Step 3: Compress ISO and Store It.

Now you will compress the ISO and store it on your computer. Compression helps to save space on your computer by getting rid of all the empty space in the ISO file. (Remember "Super Paper Mario"?)

To start compression download Winrar or 7-zip; then right click the ISO and choose "ADD TO ARCHIVE".
A new window will pop up, you can choose to save the file as ZIP or RAR, split the ISO into smaller pieces, add a password, whatever suits your fancy. After you are done tweaking it, click "OK" and the compressing process should begin.
This usually takes 1-2 hours for games that don't have a lot of free space, but on games like "Super Paper Mario" it takes only 15 minutes. After compression is over you can store to file on an external hard drive, usb drive, internet back-up site, whatever works.

Comments

[neoman4426]

I recommend updating this to use WiiFlow or Configurable USB Loader, both of which can extract to a drive formatted as fat32 or (in the experimental stage I think) NTFS so they don't need a separate program on the computer unless you want to convert them and play them off a disc instead of the drive

[baconmaster]

yeah its the HDD, works fine now.....all i need is getting the iso's to play without the error message

[baconmaster]

Having trouble getting this to work, it all goes well untill i try to "backup" my wii disk, it does a bit- then hangs. the music was still playing so i wasnt sure if it was working or not. (backup to 100GB HDD).

[Solderguy]

Are you trying to back-up a burned Wii disk or a store bought Wii disk?

[baconmaster]

store bought of course, i tried to burn wii play (i thought it would be a small file {which it is}) it got to 49.9% and stopped, music kept playing so i left it for a while. but it didnt start again. im running firmware 4.0E if it helps ( but i softmodded it ages ago)

[Solderguy]

The only thing I can think of is if your Wii laser is near dead. Are there any scratches on the DVD? Do you get read errors while playing games?

[baconmaster]

there arnt any scratches on the DVD, did a update using the auto update feture and then tried wii play (i baught it for the controller) and its small at 200MB (i think) and it worked!, then i tried wii sports at 650MB (i dont remember) and it stopped @ 31.54% im going to try to burn it to SDHC card then transfer it to the HDD (i also suspect that the HDD doesnt have enough power to write it all, it has a 12V input plug on the side but its a laptop HDD so I dont know) ill comment again if anything interesting turns up

[Foaly7]

but can you then play them on the computer?

[Solderguy]

No, you can't; that is unless you have a Wii emulator on your PC. But emulators are extremely slow, and buggy, and not worth it if you can just play the game on your Wii.

[matstermind]

with dolphin you can play some wii games at like 1-2 frames per second

[maxpower49]

does this automatically compress the game as it rips or do you have to compress it once its on your computer

[Solderguy]

You have to compress it again unfortunately. Or you can run WiiScrubber 1.30 to strip the empty space, it will be exactly the same size as if you compressed it except it won't take 3 hours.