Q&A for How to Set Up an External Hard Drive on Wii U

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What can I do if it does not pick up my external hard drive?

Community Answer

What do you mean by "pick up?" I had the issue where the WiiU stated "cannot format HDD," so I plugged it back into my PC and formatted it (with miniTool partition wizard free version) as FAT32 with 32kb clusters. The WiiU was then able to format it appropriately.

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Question

How much time is needed to format 2 TB of external memory?

Milos Tosic

Community Answer

It depends on how many files you have on your external drive. If you don't have anything, it should be done within a couple of seconds.

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Question

I followed steps 1, 2, and 3. I plugged the external hard drive into one of the back USB ports in the Wii U console. I turned the Wii U back on and it did not give me a message to format it. What should I do?

Erick Hagstrom

Community Answer

From the Wii U menu, open System Settings. First, you'll see "Internet". Scroll to the right. Open "Data Management". Select "Format USB Storage Device". Follow the prompts from there.

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Question

How does the Wii U format? Does it use FAT32 or ext4? What is the Wii U's normal cluster size?

Community Answer

Wii U does not use Fat 32 ot NTFS or ExFat, these are used by PC's, Laptops etc. Wii U uses WBFS.

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