Homebrew [HELP] Firmware update causes memory card to no longer work

[brekki]

ANY advice would be greatly appreciated, I'm kind of distraught over this whole thing. Apologies in advance for any obviously stupid mistakes I made that may have caused this.

Last night I decided there was a game I wanted to buy from the eShop so I used homebrew (ThemeHax O3DS) to access the eShop in order to purchase it. After that I powered down my 3DS (I think) and restarted because I didn't know how to get back to the home screen from the eShop when it's being run through homebrew. I selected the present icon to start the download but I got an alert telling me I needed to upgrade my firmware first. Since I hadn't been using homebrew very much I decided it was worth 'breaking' the hack in order to get my game. I selected update, plugged in the AC cord, etc. and when the system was done updating it auto-restarted but the screen stayed black.

I powered down the 3DS and removed the memory card. From there I removed all of the exploited related files so that I was down to three folders: 'Nintendo 3DS,' 'Private,' and 'DCIM' which I thought/think are the defaults. That did not solve the problem, booting up the 3DS still resulted in a black screen.

The 3DS runs without the memory card inserted without problem. I have a second formatted memory card that I inserted and allowed the default 3DS files to be created on so I could see precisely what it was that I needed. I downloaded a game to that card and of course it runs fine. I tried to then replace just the files in the very last folder with titles such as 'db' and 'extdata' but this makes the new SD card also not work, however it did do something interesting.

With the new SD card and the old files I was able to get to the screen that asks if you're sure you want to shut the 3DS down and I hit the home menu button which then loads the screen that says 'Home Menu' but it never makes it past that.

All of my games are digital versions and I'm assuming that because of that all of the savedata/backups are on the SD card and if I were to format it and re-download my games I would have to start over completely in each one?

Thank you for reading all of this and again, any thoughts/help would be greatly appreciated. I can provide more info if needed.

 

[Rosselman]

Insert the SD card once you power on the 3DS, and then change the theme. That'll remove themehax, which is the one causing the problem.

 

[Uziskull]

Pretty sure you just need to remove themehax.

Edit: ninja'd

 

[brekki]

Insert the SD card once you power on the 3DS, and then change the theme. That'll remove themehax, which is the one causing the problem.

Oh my god inserting the SD card once the unit was on and then changing the theme (even though it gave me an error) worked!!!! THANK YOU so much!! I am almost crying. Like yesterday was my birthday and I spent a million hours trying to figure out how to fix the SD card after fucking it up and that's not really relevant but i was so upset thank you!!

 

[Joom]

So wait, you threw away homebrew for a single game?

 

[Uziskull]

So wait, you threw away homebrew for a single game?

If a game is worth it, I can see why he did that. The homebrew scene is still growing, and there'll be more ways to access homebrew in the future, so that's not a big deal.

 

[brekki]

If a game is worth it, I can see why he did that. The homebrew scene is still growing, and there'll be more ways to access homebrew in the future, so that's not a big deal.

Yeah, and I mean I wasn't really using any of its features + there will most likely be homebrew updates for 10.whateverfirmwarethisis.0. It was worth it to me. I didn't really know that downloading the game from the eShop when accessed through homebrew would require a firmware update in order to install either. So yeah thanks to those who helped.