Hacking Banner Brick on a Japanese Firmware Wii with no Bootmii or Preloader

[vinzanity]

As I understand, Error 003 fix on a Wii with Japanese Firmware is not possible due to the Kor/PAL SSBB (which supports Auto-boot) not able to run under Japanese language right? Does this mean Banner bricked Wiis with Japanese firmware is also out of luck? Even if I am able to run Yu-Gi-Oh J using a Wode, I wouldn't be able to access HBC (or any homebrew) without the save file installed right? Are there any other options for banner bricked, bootmii-less, pre/priiloader-less Japan firmware Wiis?

 

[giantpune]

you can use one of the methods that kicks you to the data management portion of the settings. the "fill up the nand with huge saves and then try to install the mario kart channel" method should work regardless of the language setting of the wii. theres also the netflix disc, which afaik, is only available in north america.

the basic idea is that you get a game such as mario kart, rabbids go home, or wiifit that installs a channel. it has to be a channel you havent installed on the wii yet. then you get a game like guitar hero WT that has a screen in it that tells the free space on the nand. then you go rent a pile of games and play them long enough for them to create save files and fill up your nand. use the guitar hero game to monitor your progress. once you have less free blocks than the channel installing games wants you to have, you fire up that game and tell it to install its channel. it will fail, and boot you directly to the portion of the system menu that lets you delete stuff. there you can delete all the useless saves, and the channel that has bricked your wii.

 

[mauifrog]

I would try my luck with disc swap and loading the netflix ntsc-u disc, I have not tested it, but if you could disc swap to it you should be able to load data management. Also wiifit jap, if there is a wiifit jap, wiifit can get you to the settings if you choose to reset the date and time (but you need a balance board).

As for ssbb-pal, it is only the jap language that prevents it from loading, so if you had a usa/euro wii and installed 4.2/4.3 jap on it, the settings would still be usa/euro and the game should load, same for ssbb-kor if your wii was kor. If you have jap settings, you can't load ssbb-pal/kor.

Also, if a wii is semibricked the recovery disc should have title id matching the installed system menu, and region string matching the setting.txt. (only in some cases)

If you are loading via wode, I believe that the gc starfox iso from ssbb works well to discswap. That would be in region, so for you would be ssbb-jap, extract the starfox iso and try to use it to swap to the netflix disc. Or try one of the other discswap that work, but wode is different than chip, what works for wode does not always work for chip and the inverse is true.

Also if you have a error 003 4.2/4.3 jap wii, your probably screwed unless you have some patched ios loaded by games, or your language in setting.txt is a euro language.
Data managment will not load on error 003 wiis.

 

[vinzanity]

Wow this is just like a dream :-) The guys I expected to answer did answer. Actually giantpune's recommendation was the one I had in mind. Fill-up the nand with saves until it brings me to the data management side of the System Menu then go to the Channels page and delete the channel but my concern is: If that channel has a badly-sized png used in the wad which is causing the banner brick, wouldn't loading the Channels page also try to show the banner of that wad and again give me the a black screen or "System files are corrupt" error? Or will it give me a few seconds (while the banners are being loaded) to quickly click the channel and remove it? Do Wiis only check the validity of the banners during boot-up? I have yet to get my hands on my friend's Wii with this scenario so I'm basing everything on theory right now. Giantpune and Mauifrog, thanks for the answers and let me take this opportunity to thank both of you for the fix of my error 003 last year :-) So I guess my friend's wii still has hope.

 

[mauifrog]

If your lucky he will have a patched system ios, then you can use a recovery disc. Or if he had a patched game ios, like ios36 he could swap to a recovery disc.

All these ideas can be found here
http://www.wiihacks.com/bricked-wii-issues-only/53901-recovery-menu-brick-fixing-savemiifrii-autoboot-disks.html