Hacking Dusting off a 7 year old hard and softmodded wii. Few questions.

[DrLucky]

Back in 08 I had a hardmodded and softmodded wii with the HomeBrew Channel emulator channels and all sorts of cool stuff.
I left the wii home as I went off to college, quit college, moved out of state, moved back, got married and proceeded on with life.
I visited my folks not long ago, and sure enough they still had my old wii!
I asked if they'd mind me taking it with me, but apparently its still getting used by my mother for wiifit (all that potential, wasted haha). Anyway, I bought her a replacement wii to suit her purposes, and as soon as it comes in the mail, I'll have my old masterpiece back!

I have a number of questions though, but not sure how to ask them. I remember the system could not be updated through Nintendo due to the IOSs I had installed. AFAIK, my mom never updated the system, so I should be good there.
I imagine many of those IOSs are obsolete or need to be updated. Is there an app that will tell me what's installed?

For the life of me, I can't remember the name of the mod chip I had in it. Aside from locating the special screw driver and disassembling the system, is there a way I can find out what sort of chip is in it?

My goal is to get my system as updated as possible without losing functionality.
I would just start from scratch with the other wii I just bought on ebay but I remember my mod chip needed a very specific board chip to be compatible, so I'd rather just keep with my original system.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the zelda horse name hack isn't used anymore? haha

If anyone can help get me going I'd very much appreciate it. I'm not a noob, but I'm not an expert anymore either haha.
Ask me anything you need to help me figure out the state of my wii. I'll do my best to remember or find out what I can.
I do have a fold in a back up of my desktop from that time that has all sorts of IOSs and hacking files I had used or planned to use at one time before.

 

[DinohScene]

Modmii, that's the only stop you'll need for softmodding your Wii.

I'd advice USB loading (saves you on backup discs etc)
Modchips are pretty much redundant now.

 

[DrLucky]

Modmii, that's the only stop you'll need for softmodding your Wii.

I'd advice USB loading (saves you on backup discs etc)
Modchips are pretty much redundant now.

Aren't mod chips much more reliable than soft mods?
Also don't soft mod options require loading games through a different channel than the main disc game channel?

 

[DinohScene]

Softmods do require game loading through a different channel yes.

Modchips are pretty much only useful for backup discs via the disc channel (useful for Riivolution)
USB loading has the advantage of never having to switch physical discs, easy access to all games, less loading times, no Disc read errors and above all, quicker to play the game.

 

[DrLucky]

Can I load games off an external HD via usb? Or must it be a flash drive?
Is there a guide to safely resetting the IOSs or a way to set that side of soft modding up correctly?

 

[DrLucky]

Ok! Got my original Wii today! Mod chip and HBC still working!
However, I'm on version 3.1 of the Wii software. The ModMii tutorials say to be on 4.3. I have no problem with that except that due to some of the IOSs I have installed already as well as BootMii, I'm nervous about updating.
What should I do?

 

[DrLucky]

I have Preloader v 0.27 installed. as well as starfall and xyzzy if that helps at all.