Hacking Extracting the contens of a IOS WAD

[calthephenom]

is there any way i could extract the bin file from an IOS WAD (if i'm not mistaken, a elf and bin file are simultaneously executed, like how bootmii does it), so that i could replace MINI, that way bootmii would be running under IOS, but a IOS that wouldn't be corrupted, so if you fucked up your wii, you could just run IOS off of your SD card.

 

[WiiCrazy]

There's no such thing as MINI running under IOS... MINI itself replaces the IOS functionality.... or to put it more correctly it's just an IOS like interface for the PPC part to access hardware..

No sense in what you wrote... read about it a liitle more and you'll understand...

Wads are unpacked using wad unpackers btw...

 

[tueidj]

It's not a shit load of work, it just requires an IOS exploit to inject the code (think of it like the twilight hack for starlet instead of the PPC).

 

[calthephenom]

There's no such thing as MINI running under IOS... MINI itself replaces the IOS functionality.... or to put it more correctly it's just an IOS like interface for the PPC part to access hardware..

No sense in what you wrote... read about it a liitle more and you'll understand...

Wads are unpacked using wad unpackers btw...

thats not what i meant at all.
when bootmii as boot2 starts up, it looks for armboot.bin (aka mini), my question is, could you use the an IOS's bin file and replace MINI with a non-corrupt IOS (so if someone destroys every IOS using CIOSCORP or etc, they could recover using an IOS off of their SD card)

 

[SifJar]

I believe that cBoot2 does effectively what you imply by loading a patched IOS from the SD card via BootMii, and should work without any working IOS.

However, the way you wish to do it wouldn't work at all I don't think. If you extracted the binary from an IOS (which is effectively an ELF with and ELF loader attached), and put it in the place of armboot.bin, assuming it DID work, BootMii would not load as that is a function of BootMii's armboot.bin, and as regular IOS will not load any PPC code unless instructed to do so, I think nothing would happen.

 

[techboy]

I believe that cBoot2 does effectively what you imply by loading a patched IOS from the SD card via BootMii, and should work without any working IOS.

It doesn't (tried on a friend's wii - he had deleted all his IOSes removing CORP...).

I've read that cboot2 loads most of IOS from NAND, and only loads a module or 2 from SD (most notably the ES module). It's quite hard to load IOS off the NAND when they have all been uninstalled.

What we really need is a WAD Manager that runs on MINI. Right now, the only thing that installs WADS using MINI is Comex's NAND formatter.

 

[techboy]

I almost asked pune (I hate bugging him though) if he could edit the formatter to take out the actual formatting part and just leave the wad installing, but it is still too buggy and I wonder if it would do things improperly with data already in the nand.

Sounds like more motivation to debug the formatter...

 

[SifJar]

Right now, the only thing that installs WADS using MINI is Comex's NAND formatter.

I almost asked pune (I hate bugging him though) if he could edit the formatter to take out the actual formatting part and just leave the wad installing, but it is still too buggy and I wonder if it would do things improperly with data already in the nand.

I think there is a build with the formatter part removed floating about on the 'net somewhere.

EDIT: And after a quick glance, I have an inkling that it only requires commenting out one line (which has reference to formatting) and then compiling to make it not format first. Although I could quite possibly be completely wrong about that.