So, the 3DS-side soldering was a success, the device still works fine. Deep sigh of relief.
Now, am I correct in saying the device needs to be turned on in order to read/write the nand? This'd mean I have to mess up my case so I can get the wires outside, with the battery still in.
I'm on OS X, so I'll be using the dd command. Just want to verify if this is the correct usage:
Backing up current nand: dd if=/dev/nand of=/path/to/backup.bin
Restoring previous nand: dd if=/path/to/backup.bin of=/dev/nand
Thanks!
UPDATE: After soldering the wires to a SD-to-USB adapter and plugin it into my computer, it shows up in Windows Explorer (Windows 8) as a removable drive mounted on E:\.
But Win32DiskImager doesn't list
any devices (yes, I ran as admin), and when using
dd for windows I am told the drive is not ready.
On Ubuntu, it doesn't show up at all, anywhere. Any ideas?
UPDATE 2: Tried it with a friend's laptop, Windows 7. It showed up, Win32DiskImager recognized it. Great! Unplugged it to double-check the firmware version so I could give the backup a meaningful name. Plugged the 3DS back in, and... nothing. Didn't show up anymore.
On initial plug-in, it did give the "installing device drivers" message. Going to try doing a clean install of Windows 7 on my own machine and working from there.
UPDATE 3: I am an idiot. I thought that soldering the wiring directly to the SD-to-USB adapter would be no different from soldering it to a microSD-to-SD that you'd insert into the SD-to-USB adapter. Well, I was wrong. Still no idea why, but after doing the wiring exactly as examples have shown, it works perfectly.
(Why didn't I think to follow exact instructions in the first place? Beats me.)