Alright, so I bought a Wii U Deluxe back in early February, and thus far have only played Nintendo Land and Wii games on it. I experienced freezing problems, as did many others, in which the console would freeze, emit a slight buzzing sound from the TV, and force me to unplug the console to shut it off. I had heard that going into Miiverse and changing your settings to "English Only" helps stop the freezing, which it did for some time.
Recently I bought Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, which I updated and began playing the night I bought it. That's when a new freeze started to happen. I would occasionally get the one from before, but usually this happens:
My screen freezes up with these glitchy green bars across the screen, and a much louder, static-y buzzing sound, (I would've recorded a video of it so the sound can be heard but I'm too scared to leave the console in this state long enough to record any of it, I snapped the pics and unplugged it,) once again causing me to unplug my console. This happens fairly randomly, but I rarely go more than 10-30 minutes without it happening. I have plans to grab the 3DS version of the game once the transfer tool is released, but I'm simply wondering if this freeze is something that will potentially be fixed in a future firmware update or if it's a more serious issue with my console.
I'd really hate to lose my Wii data and the countless VC games/save data/game hours stored on it, among the other things saved on my Wii U, so I'm hoping against hope this isn't a console defect. I haven't given Nintendo a call yet because I've had poor experiences with phone tech support in the past and figured I'd see if anyone here knew the cause of this issue.
Things that may be noteworthy/significant are that I have it hooked up via HDMI cable, and have an External HDD formatted for the Wii U and hooked up to it. As for the internet connection I have it connected via the Wii's Ethernet adaptor. I've tried playing the game with both the Internet and the External HDD disconnected but that did nothing to fix the problem. I also took my original MH3U disc up to exchange for another copy hoping it was a disc defect, but other than the first few times I used it lasting longer than usual, having a new disc has not fixed the problem.
Another thing worth mentioning; when the screen freezes, the Wii U Pad screen freezes in the same manner with the same green bars.
Any insight would be appreciated. Again, my biggest concern isn't fixing the problem itself yet as much as it is figuring out whether my entire console is defective or not.
*EDIT*
Forgot to mention that, as the topic implies; I've seen very few people with the same specific problem as I have. 99% of the people and threads I've seen about Wii U freezes are of the typical buzzing one, not the one with the loud, distorted audio and green bars that I've been experiencing.