Hacking I'm an idiot, backed up A9LH SD card using Win32DiskImager but wont boot after restore

[panicacid]

Evening guys, so... Sadly I'm one of those stupid folk who followed plailect's guide, went through with Cubic Ninja just fine.

Backed everything up as instructed and I've had trouble free usage for months and months. It's been great.

Then I needed my SD card for something else, so I figured back it up with Win32 like I would for an RPi image etc.

Until I restored that image and the O3DS XL wont boot, black screen.

I'm about to follow the guide on here for recovering from a formatted / wiped SD card. However I was just wondering if anybody has a clue as to what's gone wrong?

Do I need the Emunand partition? I was under the impression that comitting my changes to the SysNAND negated the requirement for an EmuNAND partition?

From what I've read it should be as simple as restoring my Win32 image but obviously that hasn't worked.

Any ideas on what's gone wrong and if I can still recover from my backup i.e. to maintain saves and installed games etc?

 

[x65943]

Sounds like you're just missing a few files on the sd card that allow your system to boot.

Are the files on your sd card readable from your computer?

 

[Exaltys]

I just backed up my card by creating a folder on my desktop and copying everything from my card into it. I'd say just restore the image, copy your save files, and start you card from scratch.

 

[simon66]

Evening guys, so... Sadly I'm one of those stupid folk who followed plailect's guide, went through with Cubic Ninja just fine.

Backed everything up as instructed and I've had trouble free usage for months and months. It's been great.

Then I needed my SD card for something else, so I figured back it up with Win32 like I would for an RPi image etc.

Until I restored that image and the O3DS XL wont boot, black screen.

I'm about to follow the guide on here for recovering from a formatted / wiped SD card. However I was just wondering if anybody has a clue as to what's gone wrong?

Do I need the Emunand partition? I was under the impression that comitting my changes to the SysNAND negated the requirement for an EmuNAND partition?

From what I've read it should be as simple as restoring my Win32 image but obviously that hasn't worked.

Any ideas on what's gone wrong and if I can still recover from my backup i.e. to maintain saves and installed games etc?

Hold on, you made an image of the SD Card and wrote that to the system? If so, the system is bricked.
Do you have a NAND backup?

 

[x65943]

Hold on, you made an image of the SD Card and wrote that to the system? If so, the system is bricked.
Do you have a NAND backup?

He did not restore an image of an sd card to his 3ds nand. Tools have safeguards to prevent such things. He restored an old image of his sd card to the very same sd card.

 

[panicacid]

Correct,

I took a backup of the SD card using Win32 which saves it as an IMG file extension, I then restored that to the SD but it doesn't boot.

My theory is because of the EmuNAND partition which doesn't exist on my restored SD card because my backup choice only backed up the actual partition with a drive letter not the hidden EmuNAND one.

I can indeed access the SD card in Windows once it's restored. All of my files are there Luma, ARM9Loader.bin etc.

I do also have backups that were instructed during the following of plailect's guide.

sysNAND-A9LHAX.bin as well as EmuNAND_formatted and EmuNAND_Original bins and SHAs etc.

To be honest I figured I'd be able to get this fixed by following the guide again but it is very very different from the last time I viewed it.

Really appreciate the quick response btw. Did not expect it! This forum is awesome.

 

[x65943]

Correct,

I took a backup of the SD card using Win32 which saves it as an IMG file extension, I then restored that to the SD but it doesn't boot.

My theory is because of the EmuNAND partition which doesn't exist on my restored SD card because my backup choice only backed up the actual partition with a drive letter not the hidden EmuNAND one.

I can indeed access the SD card in Windows once it's restored. All of my files are there Luma, ARM9Loader.bin etc.

I do also have backups that were instructed during the following of plailect's guide.

sysNAND-A9LHAX.bin as well as EmuNAND_formatted and EmuNAND_Original bins and SHAs etc.

To be honest I figured I'd be able to get this fixed by following the guide again but it is very very different from the last time I viewed it.

Really appreciate the quick response btw. Did not expect it! This forum is awesome.

Do you have a backup of your emunand that you dumped with decrypt9? What's your CFW?

 

[panicacid]

Now you're asking. I think I might have used RXToolkit to do the backup as I think that's what plailect's guide went through, but yes I have backups of the NAND through each step of the process.

Also I've just followed this guide: https://gbatemp.net/threads/tutorial-a9lh-users-recover-from-formatted-deleted-sd-card.444161/

and at step 1 the 3DS doesn't boot. So i'm 99.9% sure I need to restore this EmuNAND partition but I don't have a clue where to start. I tried using 3DS MultiNAND Creator to restore my images but I didn't get much joy and I'm not even sure if I was restoring the correct file.

 

[x65943]

Use a different sd card formatted to fat32, follow step 1 and see what happens.

 

[panicacid]

I did, it was the original 4GB Lexar that came with the 3DS that I tried it with, I didn't format it I just deleted the default nintendo stuff that was on there but no dice. Just using 3DS MultiNAND again to try restoring my SysNAND-A9LN.BIN file (it's got the latest date modified on it in my backups folder so I'm guessing it was taken last as the final this is your CFW NAND back it up (Damn this is hard without the original guide on github, otherwise I'd know exactly which step to jump back into).

Once that NAND.bin is injected onto the SD card I'll try copying the contents of my backup onto the SD's data partition and see if it'll boot.

IF that doesn't work I'll reformat making sure it's FAT32 and try step one in the above again although I'm sure the default SD is formatted to FAT32. - Infact just doublechecked and yeah it's FAT32 already so no dice on that one... Will repost with the status of my latest attempt though. Any other ideas please do let me know as I'm not confident this will work.

 

[x65943]

Did you make sure to put the 3ds folder on the root of your sd card, and not the "hax" folder that it is found in - in the latest release?

 

[panicacid]

Yes, second time around ha ha. at first I dumped the contents of the download onto the root hoping for the best. Then when it didn't work I double checked and correctly copied only the specified files and folders but still nothing.

Copying the 50+Gb of stuff back to the SD after injecting the backup nand says it's going to take a while so I'm going to get some sleep and see what happens after its copied all of those files back.

Urgh so frustrating, try doing the the right thing by imaging the sd card only to fall foul of a hidden partition which my 3ds boosts from :'(

I'm confident it's fixable, just going to take some failed attempts first I think.

Although I'm sure I'm not going to be the first and won't be the last so hopefully when I figure it out others can find the fix here or before I figure it out somebody else can post the fix haha.

 

[x65943]

Yes, second time around ha ha. at first I dumped the contents of the download onto the root hoping for the best. Then when it didn't work I double checked and correctly copied only the specified files and folders but still nothing.

Copying the 50+Gb of stuff back to the SD after injecting the backup nand says it's going to take a while so I'm going to get some sleep and see what happens after its copied all of those files back.

Urgh so frustrating, try doing the the right thing by imaging the sd card only to fall foul of a hidden partition which my 3ds boosts from :'(

I'm confident it's fixable, just going to take some failed attempts first I think.

Although I'm sure I'm not going to be the first and won't be the last so hopefully when I figure it out others can find the fix here or before I figure it out somebody else can post the fix haha.

It sucks when things like this go wrong. In the future, don't image your whole sd card.

Goodluck, and goodnight.

 

[panicacid]

On the contrary I think my mistake was not imaging the whole sd. looking at guides here for the 3ds cfw and moving to a bigger sd card etc. everybody seems to reccomend USB Image Tool? Which images the entire thing.. hindsight is a wonderful thing aye?

Thanks again for the support g'night for now.

 

[x65943]

On the contrary I think my mistake was not imaging the whole sd. looking at guides here for the 3ds cfw and moving to a bigger sd card etc. everybody seems to reccomend USB Image Tool? Which images the entire thing.. hindsight is a wonderful thing aye?

Thanks again for the support g'night for now.

What I do is simply drag and drop all the contents of the sd card to the computer, and use decrypt9 to dump the emunand from its partition.

It's easier and requires no extra tools.

 

[panicacid]

Well sadly injecting my SydNAND-A9LN.bin and then copying my sd card files back didn't work.

Is that the bin that we think I should be using? Maybe EmuNAND-Formatted.bin is the one I should be using. Argh.

I'm sure I'm not the first person that's followed plailect's guide and wound up losing the SD card etc.

Think it's worth posting on his git too?

 

[The Real Jdbye]

On the contrary I think my mistake was not imaging the whole sd. looking at guides here for the 3ds cfw and moving to a bigger sd card etc. everybody seems to reccomend USB Image Tool? Which images the entire thing.. hindsight is a wonderful thing aye?

Thanks again for the support g'night for now.

Win32DiskImager does image the whole drive. I used it myself to move emuNAND to a new SD card.

 

[Arkansaw]

was your sysnand and emunand linked?

 

[panicacid]

I'll be honest Arkansaw I'm not sure what that means?

RE Win32. when I restore my image I only have one solid partition, I'm not sure if that's correct though. I've found an old copy of the guide so I'm going to flip through that and see where it gets me. Will report back when I get home from work.

 

[xBleedingSoulx]

Can't you try doing it without the disk image? Just try starting with a fresh SD card with the files needed to boot?