That's irrelevant. If he's hitting the home menu and boot.firm isn't a CFW itself, that means ntrboot wasn't triggered.
Only thing I can think of is to restore your flashcart back to a normal DS cart and see if you can get the troublesome system to actually recognize it. If the problem isn't your buttons or your magnet, it might be the cart, cartridge slot, or contact issues between the two.
with the slim chance boot.firm is luma 7.1... lol
or he's just failing in triggering the button combo, from my experience if you do it right the boot will halt until you release the buttons. he never answered if it did this...