Hi Everyone,
First time poster here. I have taken the issue I am about to describe to Nintendo Customer Support in Redmond, but I wanted to seek more information here while waiting for them to get back to me. Because the escalation supervisor team in Redmond noted it may take some time to get back to me, stating they will be contacting NCL personnel in Japan, I thought it'd be a good idea to see what guidance members on this forum may be able to offer in the meantime.
For the past year-plus, I have been using one of the Nintendo-approved Western Digital external hard drives with my Wii U Basic console (Western Digital MyBook Essential 1 TB) to store downloaded titles, and recently moved the majority of my save files to the drive as well after learning Nintendo had enabled drive copying. I planned on making a copy of the drive after installing the latest system update, but to my horror, immediately after I installed the update, the Wii U treated the drive as though it had never been connected to it before. The Wii U displayed the following prompt, as though it was the first time I was connecting the drive to the system!
"You have connected a USB storage device that has not been set up for use with this console. Do you want to format the device so that it can be used with this console? Please note that this will delete all data currently saved on the USB storage device."
All of my game saves and downloaded titles are still there, but are now inaccessible following the update. If anyone has any suggestions or other information regarding what could have caused this, I would be interested in reading them! Thanks!