Tutorial  Updated

CBHC Unbrick Guide without soldering

With the release of UDPIH it is now possible to unbrick CBHC bricks without requiring any soldering!

Requirements​

  • A FAT32 formatted SD Card
  • One of the devices listed below
    Note: Any other linux device capable of USB device emulation should work as well.
    Prebuilt releases are only available for the Pico and Zero.
    I will add more devices below which are confirmed to work.

Supported devices:​

  • A Raspberry Pi Pico or Zero
  • A Nintendo Switch capable of running udpih_nxpayload
If you don't have a supported Pi or Switch, I recommend buying a Raspberry Pi Pico. They're the easiest to use and only cost around 5 bucks.

Setting up UDPIH​

Head over to the UDPIH post and follow the Intructions for your device until you're booted into the Recovery Menu.

Changing the coldboot title​

Once on this screen make sure the cursor is on "Set Coldboot Title", and press the POWER button on the console itself (not the controller or GamePad)
Screenshot 2022-06-06 13-18-52.png

Press the EJECT button on the console until the Wii U menu entry corresponding to your console region is highlighted.
If you don't know your console region, check the second letter of your serial number on the bottom of the console:
  • "A" (Australia) (Australian consoles are running EUR firmware)
  • "E" (Europe)
  • "J" (Japan)
  • "W" (North America)
Then press the POWER button.
If everything worked out you should see the following screen:
Screenshot 2022-06-06 17-32-25.png

Now press EJECT and you should be back on the main menu. Navigate to Shutdown using the EJECT button and press POWER.
Your console should power off.

Now remove the Pi from the console, and power it back on. Your console should boot back into the Wii U menu.

And yeah that's it!

If this helped you to unbrick your console, feel free to support me on ko-fi!
 
Last edited by GaryOderNichts,

chrisrlink

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With the release of UDPIH it is now possible to unbrick CBHC bricks without requiring any soldering!

Requirements​

  • A FAT32 formatted SD Card
  • A Raspberry Pi Pico or Zero
    Note: Any other linux device capable of USB device emulation should work as well.
    Prebuilt releases are only available for the Pico and Zero.
    I will add more devices below which are confirmed to work.
If you don't have a supported Pi, I recommend buying a Pico. They're the easiest to use and only cost around 5 bucks.

Setting up UDPIH​

Head over to the UDPIH post and follow the "Intructions" for your controllers until you're booted into the Recovery Menu.

Changing the coldboot title​

Once on this screen make sure the cursor is on "Set Coldboot Title", and press the POWER button on the console itself (not the controller or GamePad)
View attachment 312772
Press the EJECT button on the console until the Wii U menu entry corresponding to your console region is highlighted.
If you don't know your console region, check the second letter of your serial number on the bottom of the console:
  • "E" (Europe)
  • "J" (Japan)
  • "W" (North America)
Then press the POWER button.
If everything worked out you should see the following screen:
View attachment 312773
Now press EJECT and you should be back on the main menu. Navigate to Shutdown using the EJECT button and press POWER.
Your console should power off.

Now remove the Pi from the console, and power it back on. Your console should boot back into the Wii U menu.

And yeah that's it!

If this helped you to unbrick your console, feel free to support me on ko-fi!
was thinking can this be used to hack the console like the 9.00 ps4 exploit? but without the need for the web exploit?
 

Valery0p

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This is obviously amazing, but just to be clear:
I'm unaware of bricks when installing Tiramisu/FailST, but in case something like that happened this won't be able to recover it, right?

Same if you screwed up your nand/boot1 bad enough I guess.
 

Lazr1026

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This is obviously amazing, but just to be clear:
I'm unaware of bricks when installing Tiramisu/FailST, but in case something like that happened this won't be able to recover it, right?
If you somehow mess up the health and safety and brick, it's recoverable with this, but that will likely not happen. lol
 

Reecey

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I haven’t posted for a very longtime for very good reasons but I couldn’t control myself sorry… this is huge news congrats @GaryOderNichts fantastic work this will make many WiiU owners extremely happy! This should definitely be front page news alongside his UDPIH Exploit.
 

MikaDubbz

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Does this recovery menu allow for the deletion of titles installed to the Wii U, or can it be made to allow that? My brick on my original Wii U was quite dumb, though it wasn't by means of a typical CBHC brick, but I know what I need to do to fix it. I was following a not fully explained guide that stated if you put multiple N64 roms inside of the rom folder of an N64 VC game, that the VC title will load a menu where you select which Rom to load, that part worked, but selecting an alt Rom did not load, and in fact bricked that Wii U (the N64 VC title was installed to the system, not USB). I know that if I can just delete that VC title from that Wii U, it should unbrick it.
 
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GaryOderNichts

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Does this recovery menu allow for the deletion of titles installed to the Wii U, or can it be made to allow that? My brick on my original Wii U was quite dumb, though it wasn't by means of a typical CBHC brick, but I know what I need to do to fix it. I was following a not fully explained guide that stated if you put multiple N64 roms inside of the rom folder of an N64 VC game, that the VC title will load a menu where you select which Rom to load, that part worked, but selecting an alt Rom did not load, and in fact bricked that Wii U (the N64 VC title was installed to the system, not USB). I know that if I can just delete that VC title from that Wii U, it should unbrick it.
You can delete files on the system using wupserver/wupclient.
 

hatredg0d

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was thinking can this be used to hack the console like the 9.00 ps4 exploit? but without the need for the web exploit?
To understand, this is an omission in the parsing of USB descriptors. With these descriptors, USB devices provide different information about themselves – e.g. USB version, manufacturer and product ID… On startup, device descriptors are first read from USB , followed by configuration descriptors. These descriptors do not have a fixed size, but themselves define their size in a predefined field. Also, some fields additionally need to be byte-wapped, as they are only available in Little Endian, but are needed in Big Endian.

Nintendo failed to check if the stated size matched the actual size, allowing for “out-of-bounds” byte swapping. GaryOderNichts’ blog post goes into more detail.
 

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