Broken EmuNAND - what can I do?

[vdragonv]

Hello everyone,

I'm freaking out and looking for help because it looks like I might lose all of my saves and games. I'm looking for help to see what I can do fix my EmuNAND or salvage as much as possible here.

What happened: When moving files to my SD card, I think I accidentally moved a file into the EmuNAND partition (it shows up as a separate drive with 29.1/29.1GB free). I immediately deleted the file, but it seems like that broke something.

I am seeing the following error in Hekate when trying to boot to the EmuNAND:

Unknown pkg1 version.
HOS version not supported!
Or emuMMC corrupt!

I am able to boot successfully to SysNAND.

I'm not seeing much documented around this situation online. So any help is appreciated!

 

[MasterJ360]

Start over recreate the emunand partition. We don't know what file you moved/deleted.

 

[vdragonv]

To clarify, I was trying to move a mod file to the Atmosphere folder on the partition of my SD card that holds all of the files.

But it looks like I pasted it into the completely wrong partition / drive. After I realized that, there was only 1 file I could see in the partition that should house my emunand.

 

[thesjaakspoiler]

This will be a hard one to fix.

The emunand partition itself also contains a bunch of partitions like seen in the screenshot here :
https://github.com/eliboa/NxNandManager

Copying the file onto the emunand partition probably overwrote that partition information and that is why Hekate is complaining that it cannot recognize the emunand anymore.
That partition information is in the first few kilobyte of the partition.
The partition sizes of the Switch nand are fixed and always have the same size.
So the only thing I can think of is trying to repair that partition information.
Steps are :
- create an image file of that broken partition on your SD card with a PC.
- create a new emunand on that broken partition on your SD card again with your Switch
- create an image file of that new partition with a PC.
- copy the broken partition image file to a new file, overwrite the first few kilobyte with the data from the new partition image file.
- try to see if you can mount that new file with NxNandManager and see if you can access the 'user' partition.
- if so, follow some guide how to extract your save files from the user partition.

 

[vdragonv]

This will be a hard one to fix.

The emunand partition itself also contains a bunch of partitions like seen in the screenshot here :
https://github.com/eliboa/NxNandManager

Copying the file onto the emunand partition probably overwrote that partition information and that is why Hekate is complaining that it cannot recognize the emunand anymore.
That partition information is in the first few kilobyte of the partition.
The partition sizes of the Switch nand are fixed and always have the same size.
So the only thing I can think of is trying to repair that partition information.
Steps are :
- create an image file of that broken partition on your SD card with a PC.
- create a new emunand on that broken partition on your SD card again with your Switch
- create an image file of that new partition with a PC.
- copy the broken partition image file to a new file, overwrite the first few kilobyte with the data from the new partition image file.
- try to see if you can mount that new file with NxNandManager and see if you can access the 'user' partition.
- if so, follow some guide how to extract your save files from the user partition.

Thank you so much for writing this all out. This looks very promising.

Do you have any advice on how to 1.) create an image file of a partition on my SD card with a PC and 2.) "overwrite the first few kilobyte with the data from the new partition image file"?

Specifically, for question #2, the file I pasted to the wrong partition was almost 2GB in size, so would I need to replace more than just a few KB?

Also, not sure if helpful, but here are screenshots I took in Hekate regarding the EmuNAND.