Help needed with USB loader - How to partition/format HDD. Best way to transfer iso

[Huggybear]

Just a couple of quick questions.
Thanks for the step by step guides, I have managed to soft mod my Wii 4.0E and have installed the wads for GX loader and various others.

Now I want to begin using the USB loader to play games from.

I have some questions, which I would be grateful if you could answer:

1) I'm planning to use a 320gb portable hdd. It says this needs to be partitioned? How much should I allocate to the partition and what should I format this as?
Do I need to install anything onto the HDD before plugging it into the Wii?
I have the program on the PC which I assume I will need to plug the HDD into everytime I want to transfer info (iso files) from PC to HDD.

2) if I am playing an original Wii title and wish to back this up to prevent disc scratching onto the HDD, do I use the isodump program which I have on my Wii or will GX loader be able to do this?

I know I can also burn the isos to disc (DVD-R) which I may try later.

3) I also have a gamecube loader, will that work the same as the disc loaders? If I put an original gamecube game into the Wii, could I burn the iso directly onto the USB HDD allowing me to play it from the HDD without the disc?

Thanks for helping out a newbie ;)

[fluffykiwi]

1) Depends on whether you wish to be able to devote the drive to only wii games. I made a 7Gb fat32 partition on my 320GB drive to allow some emulators, and usb loaders to use the drive for covers, etc.

The remaining drive is formated in WBFS, either using the usb loader or WBFS manager 3.0 on the PC.

2)You can then either add games to the HD from ISO on PC or directly from your Wii Drive on Wii. No need to dump the game and convert to ISO.

3)gamecube cannot currently load from USB. Currently believed to be physical limitation within Wii. Switching to Gamecube mode disables USB. Can only load gamecube games from disk, but can burn disks with more than one game on it.

I think the most recent cios has problems with gamecube support, but I'm not 100% sure of this as I hevent used gamecube backups for a while. i know cios rev9 was best for gamecube backup support.

Btw I use WiiFlow 1.1 for my USB loader, much better than USB GX, in my opinion.

[Huggybear]

Thank you very much for the advice mate.