The Wii U reminded me today what an horrendous piece of shit it is.
I need some more space on my Xbox and I remembered using an external HDD for my Wii U but I didn't quite remember what I used it for.
So, I pull out the Wii U and the fun begins. First, a controller. I grab the Pro Controller, easiest to find and yep, that's some weird specific USB plug it needs alright.
Thank god it was in the same place. Ok, let's connect the HDD "NOT RECOGNIZED" Hmm, that's not quite right. Let me go to systems settings: "You need a Wii U GamePad past this point".
Oh yes, this system is a joke I forgot. Surely I find my GamePad and Power Adapter. Now there's 2 PSU's, a charging cable for the Pro Controller and I'm holding the tethered GamePad.
I enter the system menu to find out where the storage stuff is. All it does it give me the same error: "USB Device not recognized" and doesn't allow me to check other storage devices.
I pull the hard drive and it allows me to see the storage (yay). Of course, it turns out nearly everything is/was on the hard drive. Like up until Wind Waker HD and a few launch games are on the SD card.
So that's what was on the drive, 3 - 4 years of save games and downloads including a 100% Twilight Princess HD run and god knows how many hours in Xenoblade X, Smash Bros., Earthbound and many other games.
(thankfully the 100% TP HD data is still on the Wolf Link Amiibo

)
I tried some things including disabling the sleep mode, which involved going to the error screen and holding "down" on the D-Pad and pressing "+" and "-" on the GamePad to disable it.
Yay, sleep mode disabled. It does recognize the HDD because it changes the settings?!
Let's open the storage menu "USB Device connected is not set-up for this console, do you want to format all the data?"
A quick attempt also made me find out you can't read out the files on a Windows PC because the drive does not have formatting Windows understands.
So I have a perfectly working hard drive, which the Wii U has decided to divorce from for 'reasons'.
I can only use it again on this Wii U if I format it, which means losing all the data.
Meanwhile I hear this Mii gibberish and bleep bloop blaap coming from the TV while it takes 30 minutes to to a system update that also doesn't solve the issue.
So I guess, I'll just have the Xbox remove my transfered Wii + Wii U history, literally.
Or find a way to restore it through homebrew