Hacking neek2o boots hang with black screen

[wangsouffle]

I'm not able to get uneek+di or sneek+di to boot my emunands, though they work fine in cIOS mode under USB Loader GX. I've tried both building (r96) and using a more recent beta (r96 b8.6) from the WiiFlow Master Pack. I've tried three different USB drives with uneek (USB3 64GB flash drive, 1TB USB3 hard drive, 32GB SATA SSD w/USB2 adapter) and two SD cards with sneek (1GB, 32GB SDHC) without any luck. All drives have been a single active/primary partition MBR formatted fat32 with 32k sectors.

I have priiloader installed booting straight into USB Loader GX via a dol forwarder. From there I've tried booting into my emunand via the Neek2o/back2nand channel, via USB Loader GX (the last option under Features), and nswitch from HBC.

I've tried both backing up my NAND and creating new ones in ModMii. When using my NAND backup I've tried both before and after removing priiloader manually.

I thought it might be a directory structure issue as I posted here. When testing a new emunand, I accidentally left one named the default when creating from ModMii (pl_us?) and the contents were moved from usb:/nands/pl_us/* into the root of the USB drive. It never actually booted, but at least I know it found the files.

I'm hoping I just don't understand things well enough and it's not a hardware incompatibility. I'm starting to lose my mind as I've spend almost 2 weeks on this so far.

 

[GreyWolf]

Are you filling up the NAND folder with titles first? Get it working with nothing installed first. After a few hundred titles it likely won't boot into the menu anymore so you want to make sure the installation actually works before you fill it up.

With a mostly empty NAND dump it should take less than a minute to get to the boot screen with the gray Wii TV bank.

 

[wangsouffle]

Yes, I've tried with a virtually empty emunand (fresh from ModMii with 1 VC channel installed). I've also tried with and without backups in usb:/games/ and usb:/wbfs/ since I've read it might be necessary to have something in there. I've waited 20-30 minutes on a black screen with no obvious progress.

Should I see some type of console output? I believe I do when launching from nSwitch.

 

[GreyWolf]

I think the "Reloading to BootMii" is the last output you'll see. If it's writing NAND folders in the root of the drive when you have the dump in /nands/<whatever>/ it's possible it's unable to access the folder.

If you've moved dumps around make sure you've deleted the sneekcache folder in them and the bin config file in the /sneek folder. Sometimes that can cause it to fail.

 

[wangsouffle]

It only moved it to the root when the emunand directory was named "pl..." (I forget the exact name). I believe I read it that a special function where it would automatically set up some system files on first boot in addition to building the cache?

Yeah, I've deleted the caches and config files several times. No obvious improvements.

I had assume that using sneek off the SD card would avoid any USB drive compatibility issues (flash, 4k, etc). Is using an SD card usually considered more reliable?

 

[GreyWolf]

It only moved it to the root when the emunand directory was named "pl..." (I forget the exact name). I believe I read it that a special function where it would automatically set up some system files on first boot in addition to building the cache?

Yeah, I've deleted the caches and config files several times. No obvious improvements.

I had assume that using sneek off the SD card would avoid any USB drive compatibility issues (flash, 4k, etc). Is using an SD card usually considered more reliable?

I keep my virtual NAND folders on SD, too. Saves are in /nands/save/ and installed WW/VC is in /nands/channel/.

I used a dump of my real NAND and removed everything that was unnecessary from them with ShowMiiWads.

 

[wangsouffle]

Real NAND dump and empty emunand created in ModMii didn't seem to make a difference. Same with a downloaded "empty" emunand I tried as a sanity check. I've been using same path for saves & channel so far.

I'm asking about SD vs USB for hardware compatibility. Should running sneek+di with emunand on SD be more compatible than uneek+di with emunand on USB drive?

 

[GreyWolf]

I've got it running with the r96 from ModMii on SD so it should work. Maybe try it without DI? That makes it scan everything looking for disc images.

 

[wangsouffle]

I've got it running with the r96 from ModMii on SD so it should work. Maybe try it without DI? That makes it scan everything looking for disc images.

I'll give that a shot tonight, good idea.

Is there anything in the Wii setup that could prevent this from working? I understand the cIOS setup shouldn't matter and I just need access to something to load the neek binary (HBC, BootMii, priiloader, etc). Is this correct or might a sysconfig dump show anything interesting?

 

[GreyWolf]

I'll give that a shot tonight, good idea.

Is there anything in the Wii setup that could prevent this from working? I understand the cIOS setup shouldn't matter and I just need access to something to load the neek binary (HBC, BootMii, priiloader, etc). Is this correct or might a sysconfig dump show anything interesting?

It might expect an unpatched IOS 58. I'm not sure.

 

[wangsouffle]

Removed the di file in the sneek/ directory to disable disk image loading with no luck. Then I rebuilt as just pure sneek (no di) with ModMii and replaced all the files and it finally worked!

No matter what I do I can't seem to get uneek and/or DI in either mode to work. My Wii backups load fine from the USB drive via USB Loader GX. I guess this is good enough unless there's anything else obvious I should try.

 

[GreyWolf]

There are only a few disc-based games that you have to run from NEEK to get them to work (the only one I can think of right now is the Tintin one) so if you don't care about running disc images I'd just leave the DI patch out.

 

[Nirim000]

I've got it running with the r96 from ModMii on SD so it should work. Maybe try it without DI? That makes it scan everything looking for disc images.

You just save me! thank!

 

[grandosegood]

I think the "Reloading to BootMii" is the last output you'll see. If it's writing NAND folders in the root of the drive when you have the dump in /nands/<whatever>/ it's possible it's unable to access the folder.

If you've moved dumps around make sure you've deleted the sneekcache folder in them and the bin config file in the /sneek folder. Sometimes that can cause it to fail.

this is an old post, but it helped me fix my nands too.

for reference, my file was nandcfg.bin and diconfig.bin, after moving around nand dumps, and going through a workflow of install to wii nand, dumn to sysnand, delete from wii nand, i found that my neek2o games were going black screen. now they work. i delete the contents of sneekcache (in both 01, my emunand and pl_us, the neek2o nand created from mod mii). after deleting the files, i changed paths in usbloadergx to my 01 nand, booted it and set region free hack. did the same again to pl_us, booted it, set the hack there too. now, with my newly regenerated files, games would boot from "neek" setting in usblgx.