Hardware Hacking What to do about WiiU With User account w/ unknown password and parental lock

[shefben]

As the title states, I have a WiiU I was asked to fix and its a bit of a doozy.

Its a unit I was handed from a game store owner who asked if I could do anything to factory reset it.

After about 3 days of googling It seems that the only solution would be to dump the nand's via hardware, remove the user accounts and then reimport the modified nand back into the WiiU.

Does this sound feasible? This is the first WiiU I have had to deal with before; So I am a little lost.

 

[kehkou]

Mkey Generator.

 

[shefben]

yeah, that would work if i could actually get anywhere besides the page to login. I cant create a new account because of the parental lock, I cant get to settings because of the passworded accounts. there is no 'i forgot' on the parental lock if you dont login

 

[kehkou]

Did you try entering the wrong parental password three times after trying to select a new user? If you can get that far, you also have to do the same with the security answers. Deleting the accounts in that way sounds a bit dangerous imo; I would probably break down and call the big N.

 

[shefben]

ok ill try that, thanks.

Edit: After 3 incorrect pins it tells me to go to settings to reset parental lock pin. Does me no good since I cant log into the user accounts >

so is dumping the nands and reimporting it modified with an account i know the password to the only way?

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced with Wii U problems and the Wii U operating system.

yeah, that would work if i could actually get anywhere besides the page to login. I cant create a new account because of the parental lock, I cant get to settings because of the passworded accounts. there is no 'i forgot' on the parental lock if you dont login

Can you bring up the controller sync screen?
In that case BluuBomb might be an option for getting homebrew access -- which might help gaining access to Home Menu (As already said: I'm not experienced with Wii U).

ok ill try that, thanks.

Edit: After 3 incorrect pins it tells me to go to settings to reset parental lock pin. Does me no good since I cant log into the user accounts >

so is dumping the nands and reimporting it modified with an account i know the password to the only way?

Dumping the NAND via hardware is complex and very, very risky... and it wouldn't give you the OPT (keys). Without the keys, the encrypted NAND image is random garbage data (or do you already have the OTP?)
You'll need homebrew access before a NAND dump is of any use; and as already said, homebrew access might be enough for fixing the Wii U from software side.

 

[superj2998]

I believe you can call Nintendo support and they can give you like a master key to reformat the Wii U and erase the user accounts, that's what I did once for my cousins Wii U

 

[KleinesSinchen]

I believe you can call Nintendo support and they can give you like a master key to reformat the Wii U and erase the user accounts, that's what I did once for my cousins Wii U

https://mkey.salthax.org/ can generate the master key just fine (other than for recent firmware Switch consoles)… but since @shefben doesn't get the option to enter a master key this went to a dead end.

Spoiler: rant

That is the problem with these anti-theft(?) functions in devices. FRP in Android phones, Apple even a lot more aggressive to my knowledge.
Most of the time such functions will stop the legitimate owner from resetting and accessing a device because of forgotten login credentials.
No matter if:

• "I have no idea what Google account I had used on that phone."

– or –​

• "I got a Wii U blocked with password and parental pin. Previous owner doesn't remember." (or the lock is from another owner even before)

I guess a lot of devices got and get thrown away because of this as not all people start researching how to bypass this (if even possible).

 

[Alexander1970]

*After 2 years still sitting with an black Wii U and no Gamepad synced behind this Problem too*

 

[shefben]

I just wanted to let anyone else who had this issue know; I called nintendo north american support and they walk you through the process to releasing user accounts attached to the wii u.
They did it for free, along with unlocking the parental lock.

I wish I would have wrote down the instructions they walked me through because it seems to me that someone could make a key generator for unlocking the wii u with unknown user accounts that have unknown passwords.

The process to remove the user accounts is almost identicle to unlocking parental lock with the mkey. Except the key is much longer and obviuosly different.. I think I remember getting to the key input menu by highlighting one of the user accounts and holding + - and y? I dont really remember.

I know in the future nintendo will drop support for wii u; which means someone needs to make a script so people can unlock their consoles without needing nintendo.

 

[punderino]

You could just turn it off in system config tool

 

[shefben]

is that a tool that requires a jailbroken wiiu? when I got this it wasnt modded, so i couldnt do anything with it..

 

[superj2998]

I just wanted to let anyone else who had this issue know; I called nintendo north american support and they walk you through the process to releasing user accounts attached to the wii u.
They did it for free, along with unlocking the parental lock.

I wish I would have wrote down the instructions they walked me through because it seems to me that someone could make a key generator for unlocking the wii u with unknown user accounts that have unknown passwords.

The process to remove the user accounts is almost identicle to unlocking parental lock with the mkey. Except the key is much longer and obviuosly different.. I think I remember getting to the key input menu by highlighting one of the user accounts and holding + - and y? I dont really remember.

I know in the future nintendo will drop support for wii u; which means someone needs to make a script so people can unlock their consoles without needing nintendo.

Glad to see Nintendo support was able to help you out, I was in a similar situation a while back and they also very easily helped me out

 

[BudiSantosoEffen]

is it possible to delete account using bluubomb wii u from pc?

 

[shefben]

i tried removing the account folder, it didnt make any difference. There is probably a config file somewhere i didnt find that holds the actual account numbers for the wii u os beides the user folders. so I couldnt do it, maybe i just didnt find the correct files

 

[Ondrashek06]

I just wanted to let anyone else who had this issue know; I called nintendo north american support and they walk you through the process to releasing user accounts attached to the wii u.
They did it for free, along with unlocking the parental lock.

I wish I would have wrote down the instructions they walked me through because it seems to me that someone could make a key generator for unlocking the wii u with unknown user accounts that have unknown passwords.

The process to remove the user accounts is almost identicle to unlocking parental lock with the mkey. Except the key is much longer and obviuosly different.. I think I remember getting to the key input menu by highlighting one of the user accounts and holding + - and y? I dont really remember.

I know in the future nintendo will drop support for wii u; which means someone needs to make a script so people can unlock their consoles without needing nintendo.

Hmm, and I thought that the mkey generator generated every master key (EXCEPT keys for new-firmware patched switches...)

Maybe there could in the future be an option for generating override keys?

 

[V10lator]

Wii U parent pin is like 4 numbers and most of the people setting this up are lazy, so... Next time any of you has such a problem maybe just try the most used combinations? Like 0000, 1111, 2222, 1234, 5678, common birth dates, ...

 

[Pachee]

Did anybody find the correct button combo? Tried:
- Y +
Y - +
- B +
B - +
- X +
X - +
None worked but it may be because i don't have any password locked account. It would be nice to have it documented so somebody in the future could code a tool for this too.

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

I believe the parental controls pin is kept in one of the config/prefs xml files, not with the account data. If you hadn't been able to get Nintendo to bypass it, I would have been looking at bluubomb as the only viable option.

 

[shefben]

I got bluublomb to work, That's how I was able to ftp to it. I just couldn't figure out what to after the exploit if I couldnt launch apps