Wii wiped FAT partition of my USB external HD clean. WBFS and game ISOs still there.

I just soft modded my Wii two days ago. I had everything running great, managed to successfully back up all my wii games, had NES and SNES emulators up and running, etc...
Everything was working fine, two days of loving the new capabilities of the new Wii, then after shutting down from the Wii main menu and using the power button on the Wiimote then turning it back on several hours later everything was gone.
The homebrew channel shows up in the Wii main menu, but when i go in all the programs are gone.
When I hook up the HD to my computer I can see the WBFS partition with all the games still on it through my WBFS manager, but the FAT partition doesn't even show up.

I am going to format my entire drive again, set up all emulators and programs again, and rebackup my games, no big deal.... my question is how can i prevent this from happening again in the future? what went wrong? should I get a new HD? I am using a seagate HD

Thanks for the help....
I was having such a blast with my new soft modded wii when all of a sudden it was all gone :031:

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Originally Posted by posternuts

I just soft modded my Wii two days ago. I had everything running great, managed to successfully back up all my wii games, had NES and SNES emulators up and running, etc...
Everything was working fine, two days of loving the new capabilities of the new Wii, then after shutting down from the Wii main menu and using the power button on the Wiimote then turning it back on several hours later everything was gone.
The homebrew channel shows up in the Wii main menu, but when i go in all the programs are gone.
When I hook up the HD to my computer I can see the WBFS partition with all the games still on it through my WBFS manager, but the FAT partition doesn't even show up.

I am going to format my entire drive again, set up all emulators and programs again, and rebackup my games, no big deal.... my question is how can i prevent this from happening again in the future? what went wrong? should I get a new HD? I am using a seagate HD

Thanks for the help....
I was having such a blast with my new soft modded wii when all of a sudden it was all gone :031:

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Unless it's a WiiU, it's not possible that it formatted your hard drive. Chances are something got corrupted bad enough that your computer didn't recognize it anymore. You might want to check the integrity of the drive.

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Originally Posted by dniMretsaM

Unless it's a WiiU, it's not possible that it formatted your hard drive. Chances are something got corrupted bad enough that your computer didn't recognize it anymore. You might want to check the integrity of the drive.

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Thanks for your help!

So I checked to see if the HD would show up in Disk Utility (mac) and sure enough it did. Both the WBFS partition and FAT partition were showing up, but only the WBFS was successfully mounting. The FAT partition was there, but greyed out and said not mounted at the bottom.
I tried to "Verify" and "Repair" the the FAT partition, but since it wasn't mounted it wouldn't let me.
So I simply "Erased" the FAT partition entirely and within seconds it was automatically restored and mounted!!! PROBLEM FIXED!

....Or so I think. I am still trying to identify what the source of the problem was.... was it the HD? what are the chances of this happening again if I use the same hard drive?
Or was it a program i had on the drive that messed it up? I only really had USB loader, HB browser, N64wii, snes9x, and the NES emulator(last program used before the crash).

Thanks again for any help!