Hacking Booted to CakesFW and now my 3ds seems to have uninstalled b9s (i was using luma before)

D

Deleted-236924

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Does anything happen if you hold L when you boot?

Well, nevermind. I can rule out the possibility that you could have accidentally installed to firm0, because gm9 literally won't allow you to install it.

Which version/commit of gm9, btw?

I tried to reproduce this right now, and nothing happens. 11.12, 11.4 firm, firmprot off. Boot into fb3ds 1.2, boot into GM9 1.9.0, manually boot Cakes.firm, it just brings me to the menu for it and I can boot as normal. I was thinking that maybe it was possible that the 3DS fw could overwrite firm0/firm1 if it detected you were running an outdated firm, without adequate firm protection, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

So unfortunately, I don't have all the details I'd need to hopefully reproduce it, which you understandably might not be able to provide. Might be user error, might not be. There might be other factors at play that were out of your control. But what I do know is that it's not caused by Cakes.
 
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redunka

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Huh, that's actually not the first time when someone gets their FIRM partition overwritten after booting into a CFW with no firm protection…
One of the most recent cases (also with Cakes): https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-cakesfw.391200/page-176#post-7817823
It's known to happen with Gateway, and is easily reproducible just by trying to boot into SysNAND, and since Gateway can't really boot into anything higher than 10.2, it excludes the chance of it being a user error, e.g. performing a system update.

And there were also some reports with other CFWs as well, which even led to rumors that Nintendo made some change in the NATIVE_FIRM that makes it overwrite FIRM partitions, but there's no factual evidence to support those rumors.
Unfortunately, nobody (including myself) has been able to confirm that it could happen with other CFWs just by lanching a CFW with firm protection disabled, not even by chainloading into a Nntendo's vanilla NATIVE_FIRM.
But it looks like I finally found how to reproduce it consistenly on Cakes just now.

So, it seems that the trick is to launch Cakes without firmprot patch enabled while using a firmware.bin that is too low to actually boot into your current SysNAND (that would be 11.3 if your SysNAND is on 11.12).
That also explains why it always happens with Gateway, as the copy of NATIVE_FIRM in their launcher is heavily outdated.
Well, at least that's all what I've gathered from my tests so far, sorry the wall of text.
 
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AmandaRose

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D

Deleted-236924

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So, it seems that the trick is to launch Cakes without firmprot patch enabled while using a firmware.bin that is too low to actually boot into your current SysNAND (that would be 11.3 if your SysNAND is on 11.12).
That also explains why it always happens with Gateway, as the copy of NATIVE_FIRM in their launcher is heavily outdated.
Well, at least that's all what I've gathered from my tests so far, sorry the wall of text.

Sounds like I had the right idea then. The OP on the CakesFW thread still links to a super old native firm version, so if someone gets it from there and tries to boot on a higher firm, they'd run into that issue.

So, user error, but the instructions that were given were outdated, so I can understand it.
 
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Deleted-236924

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This probably wasn't intentional by Nintendo btw. I think it's reasonable to assume that this might simply be a failsafe in case firm fails to boot, then it would get firm from native_firm title and re-flash it to firm0/firm1. That way, if firm somehow ended up being outdated during normal usage, it would correct itself after one boot attempt instead of resulting in a brick. But this has a side-effect of overwriting B9S if booting an outdated firm with no firm protections.

You would have been fine with build 202, if you had been using the firms from the (nightlies) link, which is 11.4, but the instructions on that post are super outdated and confusing. They make it sound like you need to use the firms from the "for old 3ds" and "from new 3ds" links, but those link to 10.4 firms. Or if you had applied the firm protections patch; this would still have resulted in a black screen, but at least it wouldn't have been able to overwrite B9S.
 

redunka

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What's interesting is that some of those old reports give impression that this firm partition overwrite may trigger even if boot process goes seemingly normal.
Even that one that I linked in my previous post also mentions that it "it booted fine", yet b9s was gone for them on next reboot.
Perhaps there are certain conditions that are yet to be discovered, but for now it seems like it would be safer to never try using any outdated firms without firm protection, even if that specific firm is enough to successfully boot into one's current firmware version. ¯\(ツ)/¯
 
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Deleted-236924

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Either way, I asked a mod and now there's a warning on the post, so hopefully it won't happen again.
 
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AmandaRose

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Either way, I asked a mod and now there's a warning on the post, so hopefully it won't happen again.
The warning is worded wrong though. It says

Mod edit: Warning! Using these files will cause your B9S to be overwritten

That implies that even using up-to-date versions of the files will cause your b9s to be overwritten which simply isn't the case.

It needs changed to something like.

Warning! These files are outdated. Using these files will cause your B9S to be overwritten please use up-to-date versions.
 
Last edited by AmandaRose,
D

Deleted-236924

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The warning is worded wrong though. It says

Mod edit: Warning! Using these files will cause your B9S to be overwritten

That implies that even using up-to-date versions of the files will cause your b9s to be overwritten which simply isn't the case.

It needs changed to something like.

Warning! These files are outdated. Using these files will cause your B9S to be overwritten please use up-to-date versions.

I know. I've mentioned it to them, so we'll see.

I think what is written right now is probably good enough, it'll deter people who don't really know what they're doing, so something like this will probably never happen again. Which is ultimately what we want.
 

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