Homebrew What can cause your 3ds to brick?

[Jon O'Brien]

^

 

[Lemon_]

Yes

 

[DesuIsSparta]

What kind of brick?

A hardbrick can only really be caused by something that writes to the system's nand, because the system relies on the nand to know what to do on startup. Overwriting system files has a very high potential to brick if the process fails at any point and there are no backups in place. Luckily if you have a hardmod, you basically have 'unlimited' attempts. I highly suggest if you're capable of soldering that you do so, since it's fairly fail-safe and you can downgrade on any version.

A softbrick can occur from a bunch of other things within the nand, emunand included.

 

[Jon O'Brien]

What kind of brick?

A hardbrick can only really be caused by something that writes to the system's nand, because the system relies on the nand to know what to do on startup. Overwriting system files has a very high potential to brick if the process fails at any point and there are no backups in place. Luckily if you have a hardmod, you basically have 'unlimited' attempts. I highly suggest if you're capable of soldering that you do so, since it's fairly fail-safe and you can downgrade on any version.

A softbrick can occur from a bunch of other things within the nand, emunand included.

Thank you

 

[RocketRobz]

If you have a DSiWare game/app installed only on a TWLN partition, but not on the HOME Menu, or anywhere else on NAND, trying to install a CIA of the game already on the TWLN partition will cause a brick, and stuck on an error message (Turn the power off, and try again), rendering Recovery Mode also unusable (black screen). That's what happened to my N3DS XL.