Hacking bricked my wii

[cygwynd]

Dunno what I was thinking... Had recently updated my Wii with Wanikoko firmware updater 4.3B. Everything was working fine, except for certain newer versions of doom homebrew which crashed. System menu was 3.3U. Wasn't thinking straight late at night and thought online update would be a good idea. Very wrong. Update froze at 95% complete. Let it run overnight. No dice. Power cycled to be greeting by full brick. Wii controller turns on unit. Black screen output. Tried launching recovery mode with GC controller in port 4, mashing all four directions on lower left pad. Nothing. I still have a wiikey installed from back in the day. Before the online update, I had bootmii installed as boot 2. I have a NAND backup. Am I completely screwed?

 

[MFDC12]

deadlyfoez can recover your wii with an infectus, but i do not know how much it will cost or his contact info. you can do it yourself, but its hard unless you are very good at soldering.

maybe someone else has an idea that wont involve sending it off?

 

[Lord-x]

Do you have priiloader? If you do you can hold reset as you power the wii an it will let you to the priiloader menu were you can install the menu again.

 

[cygwynd]

No priiloader, unfortunately.

 

[XFlak]

deadlyfoez can recover your wii with an infectus, but i do not know how much it will cost or his contact info. you can do it yourself, but its hard unless you are very good at soldering.

maybe someone else has an idea that wont involve sending it off?

DeadlyFoez can be reached at [email protected]
I'm pretty sure it won't cost you more than $40, but I could be wrong, so best to speak with him directly

He does VERY good work, and he's got many good references and referrals

 

[giantpune]

if you had boot2v4 & bootmii @ boot2, then the update should have not erased it. in this case, you can put the bootmii files on your sd card and fix it in like 2 minutes for free.

 

[XFlak]

+1 pune! but I doubt he's got boot2v4, since he was on 3.3... its not impossible, but unless he manually updated to boot2v4 via an app like dop-mii, his chances of still having bootmii @ boot2 after the update gotta be pretty small

 

[ziddey]

threadjack sorry.

my friend semi-bricked his wii by aborting the 4.3 update.

the wii still boots, but crashes when a disc is inserted.

no softmods.

I thought different games used different ioses? I tried a guitar hero, a netflix, and a resident evil. Figure they should use different ioses. But they all result in an error screen.

Would it be possible to drop in a cheap wiikey and make a custom disc? That'd be my first plan.

Then maybe infectus, but for the cost, I'm thinking it'd be more worth it to send it to deadlyfoez.

Or, most likely, my friend will just wait for the next update and hope it updates whatever ios was corrupt.

 

[Riley]

@ziddy

Are you able to get to the wii system menu without it freezing. If the wii is still on 4.2 use bannerbomb to install HBC and bootmii. If the wii is on 4.3 use SSBB/indiana jones

Then use the update to 4.2 section from this guide to install all the IOS's and the system menu again.

 

[ziddey]

Not my wii, but yes, system menu will boot up if no disc is in the drive. It's 4.3u, so no bannerbomb. smash/indiana won't work since as soon as a disc is inserted, the wii will crash. We tried finishing the update, but no dice.

So can someone confirm if there can be a semi-brick where any disc crashes it? Or should we try more games and see if there's one that uses an ios that will load? Seems the variety we tried so far should have all used different ioses.

 

[XFlak]

@ziddey, since your Wii was not softmodded, I'm assuming u don't have a nand backup. As such, your wii can only be fixed using an infectus if the Wii as a vulnerable boot1 (which only older wii's have). Your serial number would help us to determine if your wii is likely to have a vulnerable boot1, no need to give the full number, just the first four characters or something should do. But since this was a failed official ninty update on a non-modified console, u should have nothing to fear in sending the wii to ninty for repairs anyways.

@cygwynd, deadlyfoez is still your best bet, just make sure to send him your nand backup too so he can restore your wii to exactly how it was (but since it was able to install bootmii @ boot2 in the past, he will be able to fix it even if u somehow lose your nand backup)

 

[ether2802]

Dunno what I was thinking... Had recently updated my Wii with Wanikoko firmware updater 4.3B. Everything was working fine, except for certain newer versions of doom homebrew which crashed. System menu was 3.3U. Wasn't thinking straight late at night and thought online update would be a good idea. Very wrong. Update froze at 95% complete. Let it run overnight. No dice. Power cycled to be greeting by full brick. Wii controller turns on unit. Black screen output. Tried launching recovery mode with GC controller in port 4, mashing all four directions on lower left pad. Nothing. I still have a wiikey installed from back in the day. Before the online update, I had bootmii installed as boot 2. I have a NAND backup. Am I completely screwed?

then how come you are still asking if you are completely screwed..?? of course not, just reinstall your NAND backup thru bootmii and you are back where you were before the brick...!!

 

[techboy]

Dunno what I was thinking... Had recently updated my Wii with Wanikoko firmware updater 4.3B. Everything was working fine, except for certain newer versions of doom homebrew which crashed. System menu was 3.3U. Wasn't thinking straight late at night and thought online update would be a good idea. Very wrong. Update froze at 95% complete. Let it run overnight. No dice. Power cycled to be greeting by full brick. Wii controller turns on unit. Black screen output. Tried launching recovery mode with GC controller in port 4, mashing all four directions on lower left pad. Nothing. I still have a wiikey installed from back in the day. Before the online update, I had bootmii installed as boot 2. I have a NAND backup. Am I completely screwed?

then how come you are still asking if you are completely screwed..?? of course not, just reinstall your NAND backup thru bootmii and you are back where you were before the brick...!!

He can't. If a wii doesn't already have boot2v4, the 4.3 update removes bootmii. Because his wii was originally 3.3, he likely had boot2v2 or v3 since he never officially updated...

 

[person66]

@ziddey: can you get in to the recovery mode using savemiifrii?

 

[cygwynd]

Nope. Savemiifrii does not get me to recovery mode. The bootmii screen does not appear either, as suggested earlier, otherwise I would simply use it to restore my NAND backup back to flash. Nothing but a black screen. My wiikey v1 can be reprogrammed via disk, but the wiikey itself cannot in turn reprogram the Wii's onboard flash. It seems like at this point, my flash is corrupted to the point that the only way to recover it is to reflash my NAND backup to the Wii with a programmer like the infectus or an external programmer. Does that sound about right?

 

[XFlak]

that sounds about right to me. I've posted DeadlyFoez's infectus tutorial here on gbatemp if u are up to the challenge yourself, otherwise you can email [email protected] for help, good luck.

 

[ziddey]

I didn't check the serial, but IIRC, my friend bought his wii before I did (mine's a cutleg d2b), so if anything, I'm hoping for a real easy time putting a wiikey1 on, assuming uncut legs.

Doing so, would I be able to make some sort of recovery disc that would force a different ios, and so not cause the wii to crash as soon as the disc is inserted and read?