I've encountered a rather odd problem on the Wii U when I go to the Wii menu to play Wii games from the disc. I've encountered this problem with only two games (though I haven't tested this out with every game I own), the two games are: Guitar Hero III for Wii and Donkey Kong Barrel Blast for Wii.
Here's the details about my Wii U:
- Basic model (8GB)
- I have an external harddrive plugged into the back two ports of the system, I believe it's 150 gigabytes
- I have the system standing vertically
Seems pretty normal right? Well whenever I'd go to start either Guitar Hero III or Donkey Kong Barrel Blast on the Wii channel of the Wii U, I'd get the game to load up in the top left corner of the screen, where it says Start or Wii menu and then when I'd go to start the software, the game would try to load but then it would simply do that Wii menu loading screen where all of the grey boxes with Wii in them appear and then it would just simply go back to the Wii menu, with the game loaded still but it wouldn't actually start the software.
This drove me bonkers because the discs are relatively scratch free and they work on my original Wii still. So I thought maybe the discs are too dirty or scratched? So I repaired them and cleaned them with a kit I have but still, they would not work. After that I tryed sitting the console horizontally, no that didn't work either. At this point I just gave up and played them on my Wii, I never did the Wii to Wii U system transfer and I'm glad I didn't.
Finally, a lightbulb went off in my head, the USB hard drive! So I unplugged it from the back of the console and guess what, the games actually started up! I don't understand this though, does the Wii U think I'm trying to load extra modded content off of the harddrive? Furthermore, it's an annoyance to have to unplug the harddrive to play these two certain games, other Wii games work fine with the external harddrive plugged in.
I also tried to boot the Wii menu without going to the Wii U menu first by holding B, but I kept the harddrive plugged in. This didn't work so in summation, as long as the harddrive is plugged in, the Wii mode on the Wii U will not read those two games, but I'm glad it will read them, it's just a bother to unplug the USB drive to get it to work, since I've got a basic model, I need that external drive for a lot of things.
