Man, you guys are great. Thank you for all the support so far.
So I'm sitting in a Tim Horton's (I'm Canadian), I have a 3DS XL sysNAND on 9.2 and I finally got into Gateway mode to do a nand backup! I'm here! I have my foot in the door!
But now I'm really confused. I'm now trying to downgrade my system to 4.5 (I'm not even really sure why I have to do this lol), but everytime I press that button, it shows up as fatal error. I'm reading around and apparently it's because this 3DS has never updated through wifi. I'm not entirely sure what that means, or where to go from here.
After I downgrade, I want to figure out how to load gateway without needing wifi, and then get started on downloading some great games. I hope I can figure something out - I was really excited when gateway mode popped in. I'll wait here for a bit and see if anyone responds.
The downgrade is to allow you to access Gateway Mode without needing to use the browser exploit.
When you say "press that button", do you mean the Downgrade option in the Gateway Launcher menu? If so, is there anything in the message that might explain what the error is? If not, exactly what steps are you using? The only thing I can think of that would need a wifi update would be the browser exploit, but if you can get to the Launcher menu, that's not the issue.
You mentioned having made a NAND backup. Did you copy that backup to your computer? If you perform "Setup Emunand", it will format your card and delete all files on it. I would recommend doing "Setup Emunand" before downgrading, personally.
I'm not sure exactly what steps you've taken, so here's the steps I would do if I was starting from scratch:
- Back up Sysnand
- Copy NAND.BIN to your computer or other safe spot, possibly with a name that includes the date the backup was made or something.
- From the Launcher menu, select Setup Emunand. This will copy the current 9.2 System Version to the emuNand partition, as well as copy everything you have saved in sysNand.
- Copy NAND.BIN back to the SD card, along with the gateway.dg file for your region. (The files must be named "NAND.BIN" and "gateway.dg".)
- Downgrade Sysnand
- On Sysnand, "Format System Memory" from the System Settings menu (with SD card removed)
- Use the blue card to run GW_INSTALLER.nds to install the NVRAM profile (The downgrade will allow the blue card to work while in sysNand.)
- Make sure everything works and you can boot Gateway Mode and emuNand.
- In emuNand, go into System Settings, verify the version has "GW3D" in front of it and everything, and then select "System Update" to update emuNand to 9.8 (since you're on an Old 3DS).
- Enjoy! Everything you had before will still be in emuNand, like your Mii Plaza, installed titles, extra data, etc.
Keep in mind that this will have your two Nands unlinked, so if you want to keep them linked for some reason, you'll want to avoid doing the format. There are some minor advantages to having them linked, but for the most part it's more trouble than it's worth, in my opinion. But you might want to read up on the topic and decide which way you want to go on that.