DSi camera crashed, photos vanished - any possible recovery left? (deep dive already done)
Hi everyone. I'm posting here because these photos mean a lot to me and I want a true second opinion from people who really know the DSi filesystem.
I'll keep this factual and list everything I've already tried.
system
- Nintendo DSi (no SD card was present when photos were taken)
- Camera app now crashes immediately on activation
- HiyaCFW + Unlaunch installed after the issue (nothing was formatted)
What happened
- I took photos using the DSi camera in the past
- At least one photo appeared as the top-screen background on the HOME Menu
- Later, the camera app began crashing as soon as it tried to activate
- Eventually the camera app reported no photos
What I've already checked
- Extracted NAND and browsed it using GodModegi
- Checked:
- title/00030004 (camera-related titles)
- title/00030017 (HOME Menu)
- shared1, private, and system data
- Found private.sav and public.sav in title folders
- Mounted NAND and saves using ninfs + macFUSE
- Camera photo directories appear empty
- No camera image data found anywhere in NAND
Important detail
• The HOME Menu did show my photo as a background at one point, which makes me think cached data existed even after the camera broke.
My question
Given:
- camera crash on init
- empty camera data directories
- photos no longer visible anywhere in NAND
Is there any remaining technical path to recover original DSi camera photos,
or does this indicate the photo files were deleted/invalidated due to corruption?
I'm okay with hearing "no" - I just want to be sure nothing was missed.
Thank you for reading and for any insight you can share.
I asked chatgpt to write this out for me so It would be clear and concise. I apologize for Ai slop.