Hacking emuNAND Tool - Release and Support thread

[n1ghty]

1.0.2 introduced some checks of the nand file before the inection. Never had time to try a cfw. For a temporary fix, use v1.0.1 without these checks. I have some free time tomorrow... I may be able to release the next version with some more features

 

[Fgamer]

Nice work n1ghty.

Is it possible to make this work over the wireless microSD data management on New3DS?

 

[gamesquest1]

Nice work n1ghty.

Is it possible to make this work over the wireless microSD data management on New3DS?

I doubt it that only works as a network share so you can't really open it and raw inject stuff in as it just gives you access to the filesystem afaik

 

[laharl22]

how to ectract cfw nand?

 

[n1ghty]

how to ectract cfw nand?

Not supported. I never tried a cfw It's on my todo list but I want to finish some other new functions first.

 

[Kazuma77]

how to ectract cfw nand?

For the moment, bbcopy will work.

If you've got the larger size NAND:

"bbcopy bs=512 count=1953792 seek=1 ifd=<drive number> of=cfwnand.bin"

where <drive number> refers to the disk number (you can find this in "Computer Management" I believe, or Hex Workshop via Disk>Open Drive>All (the number next to "Physical Disk" that matches your çard's capacity)

If you have the smaller NAND:

"bbcopy bs=512 count=1931264 seek=1 ifd=<drive number> of=cfwnand.bin"

To write it back, I believe it would be:

"bbcopy bs=512 offs=1 ofd=<drive number> if=cfwnand.bin"


This assumes that you're only using CFW on the card. If you're using Ronhero's dual EmuNAND method, the seek/offs values would be 2097153 since it's been placed after the GW/MT EmuNAND, after the end of the first Gigabyte. But if you're doing that trick to begin with, you should already be aware of this.

EDIT: changed the numbers, got them from Ronhero's batch files, resulting files seem to be 512 bytes too short, so I added 1 to each count. Not that this was causing problems -- the last 512 bytes are empty.


Thanks for the update, n1ghty.

 

[n1ghty]

I need some beta testers
If YOU want to help.. pm me and I will send you the link to the current beta version.

The current beta contains:
- Full SD backup & restore (in the final version also automatic resizing if you move from a small SD to a large one)
- Extract emuNAND from SD backups
- Possibility of manual device selection
- A lot of recoding in the background...
- Minor optimizations like window position

 

[Just3DS]

I need some beta testers
If YOU want to help.. pm me and I will send you the link to the current beta version.

The current beta contains:
- Full SD backup & restore (in the final version also automatic resizing if you move from a small SD to a large one)
- Extract emuNAND from SD backups
- Possibility of manual device selection
- A lot of recoding in the background...
- Minor optimizations like window position

This could make my work easy as well as I regularly make backups to my PC and I have to manually copy SD card contents and 7zip them up as well as 7zip of emuNAND that I extract using your tool

Also I just wanna confirm if the emuNAND backup it is making for N3DS (using version 1.0.3) is now 100% compatible for reflashing it back to N3DS in worst case (I'm wondering this as I can myself only so far test this by injecting it back to SD which I assume the way it was being tested?)

Anyway thanks for this tool! It has been helping me since your 1.0.1 release for O3DS.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

If you want to flash the emuNAND to your 3DS, you will need to do a hardware modification. (nand flash dump (3ds xl) / NAND Flash Dump (3DS))

What about the NAND restore option in the Gateway menu? Will that allow you to flash EmuNAND to the 3DS?

Also, I've been told elsewhere that EmuNAND doesn't contain the firm0/firm1 partitions necessary for SysNAND, how does that work with this tool?

 

[n1ghty]

The nand restore option in the gateway menu can also be used. My text is too old
The emuNAND does contain the firm0/firm1 partitions.

The extracted N3DS emuNAND can also be rewritten to sysnand - in theory. It works perfectly with the 3DS.

Of course installed unsigned CIAs wont work and any deeper modifications could stop the NAND to work.

 

[Apache Thunder]

The ability to create emunand partition on a sd card that never had one would be a nice feature to add.

Gateway menu is slow at doing this and destroys existing data (so you always have to waste time backing things up). It is possible to alter partition sizes without destroying data. You just move the data that's in the way somewhere else so it doesn't get overwritten by the new partition. But Gateway is just lazy I suppose.

Being able to do it on the PC would make things faster as one would not be limited to the slow SD access speeds of the 3DS. Even if it had to reset data on the SD card.

 

[n1ghty]

The ability to create emunand partition on a sd card that never had one would be a nice feature to add.

This is a long-ago planned feature.
The recoding was done with this in mind, but it wont make it into this version.

Can someone with a gw and other clone card tell me whether a gateway formatted sd works in with those other cards without modification? And the other way around... I am currently not at home.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

The nand restore option in the gateway menu can also be used. My text is too old
The emuNAND does contain the firm0/firm1 partitions.




The extracted N3DS emuNAND can also be rewritten to sysnand - in theory. It works perfectly with the 3DS.

I've got to say, this is confusing to me to hell. On one hand, you obviously know what you're talking about. And it makes logical sense, since all of Gateway's patches are supposedly done on the fly.

On the other hand, there's this thread, which includes quotes such as:

yeah i tested it, hundshamer tested it, it does brick....this was a good while back when 8.1 emunand was first added iirc....and lots of people have fell into the same pit as it also applies to updating your sysnand in gateway mode to 8.x+

Of course, they weren't using this tool... but does it make a difference?
Also, in this thread, I was told that:

The emuNAND dump is incomplete, it lacks the proper firm0 and firm1 partitions for that version. It looks like those aren't console-unique so you can get them from someone who has a working sysNAND dump for that version and decrypted it with rxTools. Then you can inject them into your emuNAND dump with rxTools and it'll be ready for sysNAND.

...which contradicts what n1ghty just told me above.

I wouldn't care so much if it wasn't so high stakes. I have a legitimate reason for wanting to do this—I want to do a region change to SysNand, and the only way to make sure ahead of time that the eShop is going to work is to make the change to EmuNand first, and then restore it to SysNand. I cannot for the life of me figure out of that's going to cause a brick.

 

[Maximilious]

I wouldn't care so much if it wasn't so high stakes. I have a legitimate reason for wanting to do this—I want to do a region change to SysNand, and the only way to make sure ahead of time that the eShop is going to work is to make the change to EmuNand first, and then restore it to SysNand. I cannot for the life of me figure out of that's going to cause a brick.

There is a different thread on this site regarding changing the region of your sysNAND. I think cearp made it a while back, but it was for the OG3DS. If you're thinking about doing this on a N3DS I would highly recommend waiting for some others to test and after respectable hard-mods have been made to the N3DS... Unless you really want to jump head first and be in the first line for this.

Edit: Also considering that the N3DS is NOT available in the US outside of the XL, the NAND's may actually be a little different due to different hardware. So region changing your N3DS non-XL may not work as well as you hope it will.

On another note n1ghty, thanks for the update to the tool. I did notice on my first emuNAND restore that I was booting to a black screen - I unlinked my sys/emuNANDs, formatted new emuNAND and then restored without booting to the new emuNAND partition. It worked once, but subsequent boot's to GW mode caused a black screen. I figured not biggie just an annoyance, so I reformatted emuNAND again, booted to it once, then did the restore and viola it works now. I have had one black screen error however booting to GW mode, so I'm not sure what could be at play but just wanted to mention this to you.

 

[Killaclown]

I want to transfer my EMUnand from a small SD card to a bigger one, can this do that with only gateway/CN or would I need a hardmod?

Would the how to in this thread work if this tool doesn't? https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-transfer-emunand-to-another-sd-card-working-on-new3ds.383684/

 

[Maximilious]

I want to transfer my EMUnand from a small SD card to a bigger one, can this do that with only gateway/CN or would I need a hardmod?

Would the how to in this thread work if this tool doesn't? https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-transfer-emunand-to-another-sd-card-working-on-new3ds.383684/

Use this tool over the other thread. This will only backup/restore your emuNAND partition. Just format your whole card FAT32 before hand and you will be golden. This saves you a step that the other guide makes you go through.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Hi! I would like to report a bug that most people will probably never run into, but has the potential to be quite annoying all the same:

If you do not have enough space on your hard drive to save the emuNAND, the program will appear to work fine (no error message will be displayed), but the file saved will be invalid.

 

[TheShadowRunner]

Thank you for this very fine tool.
Just a cosmetic request, when the process finishes, could you have some indicator like a "Process finished successfully!" message pop up ?

It's the first time I use the tool and when it reached 100% I wasn't sure if it wasn't doing some other stuff like computing MD5, some integrity check or whatever and had to let the soft hang there a good 10 minutes to make sure the operation really was over. ^^;
Thank you.

 

[RupeeClock]

My thanks for the emuNAND tool, I needed to keep a backup of my N3DS v9.5 emuNAND firmware safe.

Nothing like a tool like this to safeguard against user error!

 

[Riff89]

I don't know if this has been asked or covered, but can this tool be used to recover all games and data to emunand after unlinking sysnand and emunand? I want to unlink by formatting emunand but I won't be able to access eShop as firmware version 9.6.0-24U is required to access it, but that same version is currently not supported by Gateway's emunand feature.