I've seen a few threads here about ways you've managed to brick systems, either accidentally or on purpose. How about the other way around: ways you've managed to UNbrick systems.
A couple of years ago, some guy on an IRC channel I frequent mentioned that his Wii's IOSes were broken. Among other things, when entering WAD Manager, the Wii Remote would shut off, and when running DOP-Mii, it would fail to mount the SD card. HBC was showing IOS38 v16.27 (v4123), which is unusual; it should have been IOS58. After several hours of debugging, we loaded Multi-Mod Manager... and it said it was using IOS51 v4864. RED FLAG; that's a STUB IOS. I have no idea why HBC decided to load a stub IOS for all homebrew while it was just fine using a working IOS for itself. (This explains why SD mounting failed; that's done through IOS.)
This system DID happen to have BootMii installed as Boot2. Trying to reinstall HBC using bootmini.elf didn't work. After some searching, I found a PC-side tool called Ohneschwanzenegger, which lets you install WAD files (including reinstalling IOSes) directly into a NAND dump. We ended up dumping the NAND using BootMii/boot2, reinstalling all of the IOSes using Ohneschwanzenegger, and then restoring the NAND. (For IOS51 and other stubbed IOSes, I installed the latest unstubbed version so we could get the system into a usable state by installing IOS58 and then reinstalling HBC.)
...and it worked! Homebrew no longer had problems accessing Wii Remotes or SD cards, and once HBC was reinstalled, it was using IOS58 v24.32 (v6176).
(Sidenote: When checking the NAND dump using NandBinCheck, it reported a good number of IOSes in the standard range (<100) were fakesigned, including IOS58. IOS38 was not fakesigned, which is probably why HBC used it instead. )
What other "magical" ways have you managed to unbrick a system, either via software hax or hardware mods?
A couple of years ago, some guy on an IRC channel I frequent mentioned that his Wii's IOSes were broken. Among other things, when entering WAD Manager, the Wii Remote would shut off, and when running DOP-Mii, it would fail to mount the SD card. HBC was showing IOS38 v16.27 (v4123), which is unusual; it should have been IOS58. After several hours of debugging, we loaded Multi-Mod Manager... and it said it was using IOS51 v4864. RED FLAG; that's a STUB IOS. I have no idea why HBC decided to load a stub IOS for all homebrew while it was just fine using a working IOS for itself. (This explains why SD mounting failed; that's done through IOS.)
This system DID happen to have BootMii installed as Boot2. Trying to reinstall HBC using bootmini.elf didn't work. After some searching, I found a PC-side tool called Ohneschwanzenegger, which lets you install WAD files (including reinstalling IOSes) directly into a NAND dump. We ended up dumping the NAND using BootMii/boot2, reinstalling all of the IOSes using Ohneschwanzenegger, and then restoring the NAND. (For IOS51 and other stubbed IOSes, I installed the latest unstubbed version so we could get the system into a usable state by installing IOS58 and then reinstalling HBC.)
...and it worked! Homebrew no longer had problems accessing Wii Remotes or SD cards, and once HBC was reinstalled, it was using IOS58 v24.32 (v6176).
(Sidenote: When checking the NAND dump using NandBinCheck, it reported a good number of IOSes in the standard range (<100) were fakesigned, including IOS58. IOS38 was not fakesigned, which is probably why HBC used it instead. )
What other "magical" ways have you managed to unbrick a system, either via software hax or hardware mods?
Last edited by GerbilSoft,
, Reason: +sidenote