Hacking Need help unbricking Switch that failed NAND restore due to blown fuses

Novantico · Jun 10, 2019

Hi there,

My friend and I had both hacked our Switches with ReiNX on 6.1 late last year, and all was well in that regard. In the months since, he switched to SX OS, and then more recently attempted to follow a guide to update to 7.0.1 for compatibility with newer games. Since doing so, he had been unable to get the device to boot. After some time we were able to determine he had a boot file missing on the microSD and he could get to RCM to boot into OFW, but couldn’t figure out how to get CFW working again.

He decided that he wanted to just restore from his old NAND backup from I think early 5.0 area, and start fresh. Neither of us considered the possibility that we’d be prevented from doing so by blown fuses. After going through the restore process, we found that we were unable to boot the device into CFW or OFW (through hekate). Using the name of a tool I can’t remember offhand, we checked the fuses and found that 9 were blown. Evidently that would properly correspond to only the 7.0-8.0 range of firmware, so we were clearly too far back. We messed around quite a bit and so I don’t remember everything we tried, though we did plenty of Googling and viewing various threads (including from this site) though we couldn't find any solutions, or maybe we were misunderstanding something. The last thing attempted was trying to use choidujour via PC. Sadly the keys.txt isn’t valid when running the .exe, and we get “Invalid NCA header are keys correct?” error.

Sorry if this was a bit long, but I appreciate any help I can get.

TL;DR - Tried to restore old NAND, but failed due to fuses. Can’t get into a CFW or OFW, and choidujour won’t work either

PHiLiPZ · Jun 10, 2019

Hekate ignores fuses so too many burnt is not what’s causing your issues.

chippy · Jun 10, 2019

Did you also restore boot 0/1?

Novantico · Jun 10, 2019

chippy said:
Did you also restore boot 0/1?

There isn't really any other way, is there? I did eMMC BOOT0/1 followed by Restore eMMC RAW GPP per a guide.

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PHiLiPZ said:
Hekate ignores fuses so too many burnt is not what’s causing your issues.

Yeah, that was something that had confused me earlier because I would see people mentioning that and not understand why that wasn't the case for me.

CanIHazWarez · Jun 10, 2019

I don't mean to be insult by suggesting a simplistic answer, but I'm not sure what your level of expertise is and everybody makes simple mistakes sometimes. Are you sure that you are entering RCM mode? You need to have a jig on your joycon rail, hold Vol+ during power on, and inject a payload via the usb-c port. Maybe you are already past this point, but I say it because if you've had autoRCM installed for a while, you can forget what it's like to boot without it.

Novantico · Jun 10, 2019

CanIHazWarez said:
I don't mean to be insult by suggesting a simplistic answer, but I'm not sure what your level of expertise is and everybody makes simple mistakes sometimes. Are you sure that you are entering RCM mode? You need to have a jig on your joycon rail, hold Vol+ during power on, and inject a payload via the usb-c port. Maybe you are already past this point, but I say it because if you've had autoRCM installed for a while, you can forget what it's like to boot without it.

No worries, you're just covering bases. I thought I had implied that I did more than the post shows, but after looking again, apparently not lol. But yeah, we can get into Hekate fine, and we checked the fuses post-bricking. We definitely do just fine in the RCM department. It's just figuring out how to fix things with only access to RCM and payload pushing that's the issue

Philliyxx · Jun 10, 2019

Did your 5.x nand have exfat support? If you using an exfat SD card and your fw doesn't have the update only fat32 will work

Kafluke · Jun 11, 2019

If you can enter RCM then you're not bricked. You know what bricked means right? It means unrecoverable... it becomes the same as a brick. Just a paperweight. So many posts claim bricked and its truly not the case.

PHiLiPZ · Jun 11, 2019

Kafluke said:
If you can enter RCM then you're not bricked.

That’s not necessarily true. If you can enter RCM, you can always flash a backup or if you have prod.keys, even recreate it from scratch. But if you don’t have backup or prod.keys you won’t be able to run HOS on your Switch anymore with current level of knowledge. Only Linux which is almost the same as bricked cause no more Switch games playable.

Novantico · Jun 11, 2019

Philliyxx said:
Did your 5.x nand have exfat support? If you using an exfat SD card and your fw doesn't have the update only fat32 will work

Simply because I don't think I remember well enough to even guess, I think we should act as if that's a "no." Are you saying then that the NAND restore should work if I just reformat the microSD as fat32 first?

Kafluke said:
If you can enter RCM then you're not bricked. You know what bricked means right? It means unrecoverable... it becomes the same as a brick. Just a paperweight. So many posts claim bricked and its truly not the case.

*sigh* I was using it colloquially. I could've said soft-bricked maybe to ease some pedants. Though per the other guy, you're wrong anyway.

Philliyxx · Jun 11, 2019

Novantico said:
Simply because I don't think I remember well enough to even guess, I think we should act as if that's a "no." Are you saying then that the NAND restore should work if I just reformat the microSD as fat32 first?

Yes it's possible this is why you cant boot cfw, how are you trying to boot into ofw?

restore your nand on your fat32 if it's still split up in parts, if it's been combined into the 1 rawnand file then restore it on exfat, reformat the card to fat32, then put only the bare cfw files on it and try to boot through hekate or atmosphere.

Kafluke · Jun 11, 2019

PHiLiPZ said:
That’s not necessarily true. If you can enter RCM, you can always flash a backup or if you have prod.keys, even recreate it from scratch. But if you don’t have backup or prod.keys you won’t be able to run HOS on your Switch anymore with current level of knowledge. Only Linux which is almost the same as bricked cause no more Switch games playable.

Bricks can run linux? Sweet I'm gonna turn my brick house into a bitcoin miner! I'm gonna be rich!

Seriously though, I get what you're saying it's just people turn definite words into catch all phrases these days. "Brick" used to mean dead. Gone. Paperweight. No linux, no RCM. Nothing. It's like kids using the word "literally" as "figuratively". Drives me nuts... literally

PHiLiPZ · Jun 11, 2019

To me brick was once it couldn’t be used for purpose it was built for. In case of a brick-brick even then.

Novantico · Jun 12, 2019

Philliyxx said:
Yes it's possible this is why you cant boot cfw, how are you trying to boot into ofw?

restore your nand on your fat32 if it's still split up in parts, if it's been combined into the 1 rawnand file then restore it on exfat, reformat the card to fat32, then put only the bare cfw files on it and try to boot through hekate or atmosphere.

Hey, maybe I did something wrong, but no dice. This screenshot shows all the folders/files I put back onto the microSD after formatting it as fat32. I basically set aside everything that was on the microSD prior to the formatting except for the massive backup folder with the NAND in it. imgur dot kom slash 4Jy8LB5.png [can't post links/images yet]

Philliyxx · Jun 12, 2019

Try formatting to fat32 long format (may take an hour or so) and just putting the minimum atmosphere on the card and push the fuseeprimary payload.

https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/At...8.10-master-422dce69+hbl-2.1+hbmenu-3.0.1.zip

Novantico · Jun 13, 2019

Philliyxx said:
Try formatting to fat32 long format (may take an hour or so) and just putting the minimum atmosphere on the card and push the fuseeprimary payload.

https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/At...8.10-master-422dce69+hbl-2.1+hbmenu-3.0.1.zip

Lil delay in trying this. Between my last attempt with it and yesterday, I had evidently thought I shut down the console when it was still in RCM and it died, and I don't have the jig my friend used. Fortunately I've wanted one for myself, so I'll be getting one from Amazon tomorrow and I can pick up from there.

Philliyxx · Jun 13, 2019

Good luck. If this doesn't work you will have to figure out choidujour manual downgrade or use mattytrog's recovery pack

Novantico · Jun 15, 2019

Philliyxx said:
Good luck. If this doesn't work you will have to figure out choidujour manual downgrade or use mattytrog's recovery pack

Ugh, apparently I'm regressing in intelligence or something because even with the jig I can't even get it into RCM

Philliyxx · Jun 16, 2019

Could be a bad jig. Sometimes it takes a couple tries.

LapCheong · Jun 16, 2019

Do you have other nand file to try? Even if the fuses were blown, you will be able to bypass the fuse check and boot into stock
I thinking of maybe a faulty nand file, how big is your nand ? It should be roughly 30gb or 15 rawnand.bin including 00

Worst case you might have to rebuild your nand

Hacking Need help unbricking Switch that failed NAND restore due to blown fuses

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