Hacking Question CTCaer Hekate 2 Emunand Setup - one EmuSysnand and one Emunand

[Danttebayo]

Hi there, I'm sure these answers exist in pieces in other threads but I can't find all the info in one place so I'm hoping to gather it here to help anyone that wants to set things up in this often recommended way.

I currently have no Emunand and a Sysnand at 7.0.1 with a clean backup (of both eMMC BOOT0 & BOOT1 and eMMC RAW GPP). My goal is to have:

1) A clean Sysnand at 7.0.1 with no games to have as a base
2) A clean EmuSysnand (for lack of a better term) at 8.1.0 for playing online and the many games purchased via eShop
3) A dirty Emunand at 8.1.0 for playing emulators and such

From the questions I've had answered thus far (thanks to everyone that has helped), I've learned:

* Once a clean EmuSysnand has been setup, it can be updated via the regular Switch update process because Hekate preserves the fuses
* The dirty Emunand can be updated via ChoiDujourNX and kept offline for safety

Any advice on the best way to set this up? The tricky part that doesn't seem to be covered under other tutorials is how to create 2 emunands and be able to boot either from Hekate.

For my own experience, as a test I tried to do it via Nyx/Hekate by restoring my backup to a new Emunand. It completed successfully but ended up at a black screen when trying to boot. Not sure what I did wrong there.

 

[LeMageFro]

You probably didn't do anything wrong, the option to boot an emuMMC partition on stock firmware (what you call EmuSysnand even though it's not on your system at all ^^ ) just doesn't work for now, CTCaer even removed the option from the latest release of hekate. I asked m4xw on twitter if he had planned to implement it in the future and he said yes, so we just have to wait for now. (source)

Now if you wan't to create two different emuMMC partitions on your SD it's not supported by hekate/nyx yet, but CTCaer has marked the issue as "not yet implemented", which indicates that it will be part of a future update (source).
A workaround for now is to start by creating the first emuMMC partition at the end of your SD with the space for the second partition still unalocated before (so your partititons should look like [SD partition|30GB unalocated space|30GB Fat32 partition] ), then use hekate to make this partition an emuMMC, then allocate the second partition before the third one, and finally use hekate again to make this new partition a second emuMMC. Hekate will always use the second available partition to create an emuMMC so the partition created before won't be erased since it is now the third partition on your SD. After that the "change emuMMC" option works just fine to switch between the two.
You can confirm that both partitions work correctly by booting them with CFW, then only use the last partition as your "dirty emuNAND" for now, and when the option to boot a stock emuMMC becomes available you'll just have to recreate the second partition from your clean sysNAND.

 

[Danttebayo]

Excellent, thanks for the detailed answer, @LeMageFro

I can still do most of the work now and then do the last bit once it’s fixed in Hekate. After formatting my card as you detail, I’ll copy my existing Sysnand to a ‘dirty Emunand’ then restore my backup to Sysnand to get me more than halfway there.

Then, once the feature is working in Hekate, I’ll allocate the second partition and copy my now clean Sysnand to a second Emunand and finish the rest from there.

 

[quaxon]

A workaround for now is to start by creating the first emuMMC partition at the end of your SD with the space for the second partition still unalocated before (so your partititons should look like [SD partition|30GB unalocated space|30GB Fat32 partition] ), then use hekate to make this partition an emuMMC, then allocate the second partition before the third one, and finally use hekate again to make this new partition a second emuMMC. Hekate will always use the second available partition to create an emuMMC so the partition created before won't be erased since it is now the third partition on your SD. After that the "change emuMMC" option works just fine to switch between the two.

I have been trying to do this to no avail. It just keeps writing to RAW1 and wont create a RAW2 folder for the second emuNAND. Any suggestions?

 

[LeMageFro]

I have been trying to do this to no avail. It just keeps writing to RAW1 and wont create a RAW2 folder for the second emuNAND. Any suggestions?

Do you mean that hekate correctly writes the emuMMC content in the two different 30GB partitions but links them both to the same RAW1 folder on the SD partition ? If so then you can try creating the RAW2 folder manually and editing emuMMC/emummc.ini manually to link the second partition to the RAW2 folder (you will probably also have to edit the sector manually in the file). You can also check if this tool is able to detect both partitions correctly and lets you switch between them easily.

 

[bird333]

I have been trying to do this to no avail. It just keeps writing to RAW1 and wont create a RAW2 folder for the second emuNAND. Any suggestions?

I have already tried this and it doesn't work. Unless it's been fixed in the latest Hekate.