Hacking A9LH questions

[justln]

So I've done several a9lh installations and they usually take about 4 hours by following Plailect's Guide step by step.

1. Is there any steps I can skip safely to make the process faster? I assume I can skip Part 5 Section 5 sysNAND-A9LHAX.bin backup?

2. I have these NAND files backup and they take up quite some space. What can I delete?

 

[Deleted member 366698]

1-you should make a sysNAND-A9LHAX.bin backup, as that can come in handy later if you somehow fuck up
2-you can delete the emunand ones

 

[GothicIII]

Start to shortcut the Tutorial and you end up like other gbatemp members with a bricked device without backup and no chance to recover. (because of user error)

The tutorial takes time but it's safe.

 

[CrispyYoshi]

1. Yes, all of the steps are necessary, but where you start in the guide depends on the status of your 3DS. If your 3DS was hardmodded or happened to be 2.1 or lower firmware, you could downgrade to 2.1 via hardmod, dump and backup the OTP, update to 9.2, back up your SysNAND, install A9LH, then update SysNand to 11.0. Nothing will get faster/safer unless we find bootrom one day and/or a more reliable exploit for downgrading, but every step in that guide is done for good reason.

2. The files you should truly keep are SysNand.bin (the first one you made before formatting, otherwise EmuNand_original.bin) and otp.bin: Everything else is secondary/can be recreated easily if you just have those two files. (You don't need to keep your otp.bin, but you will regret it if you ever need it again, because it takes quite a long time to obtain that file) Of course, my information could be outdated from the current guide, because I did this a few months ago and software had been updated by then.

By the way, you can .zip/.rar/.7z your NAND.bin dumps to save computer space. Also, the guide tells you what you actually need to keep on the 3ds at the very, very end of the guide in Part 5.

 

[justln]

Thanks for all the valuable feedback, 4 hours it is. At least I got all the files in a neat folder, I'll find something to do while the NAND backup runs.