A friend of mine has an R4 SDHC Dual-Core, the one with the red "2013" on the top right. He has a DSi with firmware 1.4.3 and when he puts his card into the console it doesn't detect it, and says that no game card is inserted. Thinking the DSi antipiracy might be the culprit I put the flashcart into my DSLite but the thing just whitescreens regardless of the kernel on the microSD.
I think the cart might be bricked.
I booted my Supercard and ran the supposed firmware update, then swapped flashcarts and confirmed. When it got to the "erasing" part it froze. I figured the cart swap might not be working so I patched the updater to .ds.gba and wrote it to my EZflash 3in1, so I could boot the updater without swapping the R4. I don't think my .ds.gba patching is at fault here since if I leave my Supercard in, it surprisingly DOES attempt to flash it, going through all the progress and completing(don't worry, it can't brick my SC because it's an older model with non-rewritable chip, also different hardware).
When I turn on the console with the R4 already in place, the patcher says "current version: unknown!". The behaviour is very inconsistent, as it sometimes says the cart is version 6.something, even 7, and sometimes 0.55. I assume this is either some sort of residual data or the chip inside the R4 is faulty. I've tried updates from various clones and versions. ALL of them freeze at "erasing". I simply cannot update the thing's firmware!
Any advice on how to diagnose or unbrick this thing will be very welcome.
I use the Chinese update file for 6.0.0, mentioned here, the upgrader is called 'R4i Flash Writer'. Is there anything I can do about this? As said before, I already tried card-swapping, but the upgrade program doesn't have an option that allows that (see this thread I posted: http://gbatemp.net/threads/bricked-r4-dual-core-2013.350449/#post-4694225). Maybe another firmware upgrader will do the job?
