Hacking GUIDE - How to recover installed games and their save data from a bricked emunand

[praedo]

For those who waited after 9.0 bricks and didn't delete emunand, here's a solution to recover our data from a bricked emunand. If you tried the 2.9.1 fixed SXOS you will have noticed that it boots but XCI loading is broken. That is fixed in this solution too. Straight to it:

1. Make a copy of the bricked emunand that we will use to grab the save data from. If you have Emunand inside the System NAND, move it to SD. This is done from the SXOS options menu by holding Volume UP at booting. There choose the option to move Emunand to SD as files.

2. Browse the SD card in a PC and copy the files full.00.bin and full.01.bin from the \sxos\emunand folder to a safe place. Those files contain the save data. Instead, boot0.bin and boot1 are the faulty ones that got bricked.

3. Go back to SXOS menu and choose to delete the Emunand both from System NAND and from SD card.

4. Choose to create a little Emunand of 5GB inside System NAND. When choosing that option (Files on System Storage) there's an Advanced button to exclude the USER partition and make the Emunand 5GB only. This will speed up the process since we won't use this small Emunand anymore. We just need it to generate a pair of working boot0.bin and boot1.bin files for firmware 9.0

5. Once finished, no need to reboot, just go back and select "Move EmuNAND to microSD".

6. After that, you can safely delete the Emunand from the System Storage.

7. Boot SXOS into the newly created Emunand, which will be an exact copy of the System NAND on its original version from the original firmware. Mine was 5.1 for instance.

8. Now this is important: upgrade this Emunand to 9.0 firmware making sure you are either on SXOS 2.8 or 2.9.1 (not 2.9).

6. Now you will have a fresh and working 9.0 system on SD card with 4 clean files: boot0.bin boot1.bin full.00.bin full.01.bin

7. As you can suppose, we just need to replace the files full.00.bin and full.01.bin with our copy of the bricked Emunand. For this, browse again the SD card in a PC and replace those 2 files with the ones we copied in a safe place.

8. And voilà, magic done: we got our non booting complete Emunand with all our saves now booting with 9.0 firmware. Nothing lost.

I look forward to hear your feedback. Thanks!

 

[maroofsbp]

Is it possible to use boot0/1 from other switch to recover switch with black screen after updating on cfw 9.0 with sx os 2.9 and no NAND backup.

 

[praedo]

Maybe yes, but you need the Emunand on SD and the files from a working 9.0 system. The easiest is to do it on the same console. For instance you can keep the copy in /sxos/emunand.bak and make a new one.

 

[flduch]

@maroofsbp : No it isn't possible to use Boot0 from another switch because there is some data encrypted with specific keys of the switch. If you want to use Boot0 from another switch, you first have to decrypt the data with the another keys switch and then reencrypt Boot0 with the keys of your switch. I dont' know how to do that. May be someone know how to do this ?

 

[praedo]

Maybe with biskeydump. But it's easier to recover it with a small emunand of 5GB on the same console and start from there by replacing the full files.

 

[flduch]

@pradeo, biskeydump need a Boot0 with switch specific valid keyblobs. biskeydump is needed to obtain the BIS key only. So biskeydump won't help us.

I don't see how emunand can help ? Have you a description about this ??

 

[praedo]

Generating a new emunand helps to get working boot0 and boot1 files

 

[flduch]

I don't think it can help. Have you done this ?

 

[praedo]

It helped me recover my saves and installed games from a bricked emunand.

 

[flduch]

Did your switch have a 100 % Boot0 unvalid or lost ?

 

[praedo]

It simply didn't boot because of the faulty SXOS 2.9 upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0 and replacing the files made it boot again.

 

[stsaerox]

My separate emunand v9 I think on a 512GB sd would not boot after updating the original nand to the next version. Does this guide apply in my case I want just to extract the saves from the unbootable emunand. I'm using sxos.

 

[Kabrito]

I did the whole process, but when I'm going to replace the files full.00bin and full.01bin my console gets blue screen (I use Sxos 3.0), is there anything I can do?