I have a soft modded Wii set to 4.3u, and I'm trying to run Brawl from an HDD using USB Loader GX 3.0 and the newest cIOS249 (as I've been told that 249 is the best for Bawl). It's a fresh and clean rip of Brawl's ISO (or WBFS if you prefer) with no hacks applied. I don't play Brawl with Ocarina codes (only because I'm afraid it'll make it freeze more often). It seems to freeze when loading sounds, but it happens mid-game and it's hard to detect in real-time.

It's just like when you pull a disk out of any other console without the console knowing it: the game will still play, but only until it needs to load something, then it will hang indefinitely. For example, during a fight, everything will be going fine, but then a music will suddenly stop (that's how I know it's gonna freeze) and some character sounds stop loading; the actual fight goes on just fine, but the moment the match end, it freezes, like it physically can't load the next scene.

It's possible that it may be a faulty ISO, so I'm getting another one now (like I said, it seems to be sounds related). I've heard that 4.2 and 4.3 both have trouble playing Brawl, but I don't want to tempt fate by trying to downgrade my Wii (that's brick city right there). I wouldn't mind just playing it from a retail disk, but my Wii has a broken lens and can't read disks anymore (and I'm not hardware-savvy enough to replace it, nor do I have the proper tools). It also could very well be the cIOS I'm using to boot it from. Note that every single one of my other games work, and I'm running Other M and Skyward Sword (both work 100%). And finally, I've also heard some crazy stuff about how it could be the save, but only if it's set up to read modded files (which mine isn't).

What should I do? Anybody else that can run Brawl from USB Loader GX, how do you do it? Which cIOS is the best? Keep in mind that I don't want to mod the game or anything, I just want to be able to play it as is. I know you guys are mostly Xbox, but you're the smartest group I know.

EDIT: Please disregard. A friend helped me figure this one out. If somebody wants to close this thread, then by all means, please do. In case anybody was wondering, it was the save; I just erased my old save (that I downloaded from a website) and started from scratch, and it works like a charm now.