To start off, thanks to GBATEMP community. You guys are a huge fountain of knowledge and discussion. I never had anything to contribute until now.
This story starts with an easily avoidable mistake but easy to make. I had 2 O3DS and a Gateway card. I wanted to get my second O3DS running on a newer emunand version and went to update from a Super Smash Brother's Rom to use the bundled update. From what I read it should have gone smoothly but afterwards I end up with a black screen.
I was completely puzzled as to what happened and chalked it up to a corrupted firmware as I had this problem on my other 3DS when booting into EMUNAND but was able to just reboot it back to SYSNAND and create a new EMUNAND partition.
So back to the blackscreen. I reboot. Nothing, still blackscreen. I take out the SD Card, nothing. At somepoint I formatted the SD card thinking something was corrupt on there, nothing.
What happened was, I made EMUNAND partion on O3DS #1 but not on #2. I compeltely thought I had done this. The whole time I was just using it in normal Gatewaymode. This causes a brick if there's no EMUNAND partition to write to. As far as I know there's no way to recover from this unless you flash a backup via hardware.
So I had wisely made nand.bin backsup of all my 3DS and copied them to my HDD and kept a copy on the SD cards just incase I ever needed it. Now to do a hardware mod and get it back on. It took me a few days of research, ordering a new soldering iron since mine had a shitty tip and was too hot and I needed the precision and control for the small pads on the logic board.
It took a bit of doing and the wires were all labeled and soldered on and taped down. Just needed to get it to blue screen and ready to restore my backup.
But the damn thing wouldn't mount in windows. I tried to load the NAND.bin in the imager app but it never would detect the 3DS. After trying a few different card readers and taking a break and reading up more I found out the SD card pins to the micro SD slot adapter don't match 1 for 1 on the SD pins and I needed to adjust the CMD wire over one.
So I plug it in and wait. Viola, it mounts. I'm good to go. Back to disk imager. I load up the imager and do a test read and it works. Now I pick nand.bin and go to write. Error message. This file contains no data... WTF?
During my previous attempts and being incredibly frustrated, I had loaded nand.bin and "READ" over my backup file and it was now 0 bytes.... Ok no problem I have my backup SD card with nand.bin.. OH WAIT I FORMATTED IT AND NEVER COPIED IT BACK OVER.
I'm fucked at this point. Recuva and other data recovery apps failed to recover the nand.bin fileon the root of the SD card and on the HDD with the 0 byte file. I'm bricked. At every point in the process I made a fuck up.
At least I have my primary 3DS but now the other one is bricked as fuck. Until the day comes they get keys to sign a new firmware for any console, it's just a pile of parts.
This story starts with an easily avoidable mistake but easy to make. I had 2 O3DS and a Gateway card. I wanted to get my second O3DS running on a newer emunand version and went to update from a Super Smash Brother's Rom to use the bundled update. From what I read it should have gone smoothly but afterwards I end up with a black screen.
I was completely puzzled as to what happened and chalked it up to a corrupted firmware as I had this problem on my other 3DS when booting into EMUNAND but was able to just reboot it back to SYSNAND and create a new EMUNAND partition.
So back to the blackscreen. I reboot. Nothing, still blackscreen. I take out the SD Card, nothing. At somepoint I formatted the SD card thinking something was corrupt on there, nothing.
What happened was, I made EMUNAND partion on O3DS #1 but not on #2. I compeltely thought I had done this. The whole time I was just using it in normal Gatewaymode. This causes a brick if there's no EMUNAND partition to write to. As far as I know there's no way to recover from this unless you flash a backup via hardware.
So I had wisely made nand.bin backsup of all my 3DS and copied them to my HDD and kept a copy on the SD cards just incase I ever needed it. Now to do a hardware mod and get it back on. It took me a few days of research, ordering a new soldering iron since mine had a shitty tip and was too hot and I needed the precision and control for the small pads on the logic board.
It took a bit of doing and the wires were all labeled and soldered on and taped down. Just needed to get it to blue screen and ready to restore my backup.
But the damn thing wouldn't mount in windows. I tried to load the NAND.bin in the imager app but it never would detect the 3DS. After trying a few different card readers and taking a break and reading up more I found out the SD card pins to the micro SD slot adapter don't match 1 for 1 on the SD pins and I needed to adjust the CMD wire over one.
So I plug it in and wait. Viola, it mounts. I'm good to go. Back to disk imager. I load up the imager and do a test read and it works. Now I pick nand.bin and go to write. Error message. This file contains no data... WTF?
During my previous attempts and being incredibly frustrated, I had loaded nand.bin and "READ" over my backup file and it was now 0 bytes.... Ok no problem I have my backup SD card with nand.bin.. OH WAIT I FORMATTED IT AND NEVER COPIED IT BACK OVER.
I'm fucked at this point. Recuva and other data recovery apps failed to recover the nand.bin fileon the root of the SD card and on the HDD with the 0 byte file. I'm bricked. At every point in the process I made a fuck up.
- I didn't ensure emunand partition when updating when in gatewaymode.
- I formatted my SD backup card with nand.bin
- I fucked up my wiring on SD hardware mod
- I overwrote my BACKUP of my BACKUP leading to no backup nand.bin
At least I have my primary 3DS but now the other one is bricked as fuck. Until the day comes they get keys to sign a new firmware for any console, it's just a pile of parts.