It was on the old lay down stand charger they use to give you. It was in sleep mode too. If I'm remembering right it can update itself while it's in the state right? There was a game running in the background too so it could never actually restart it self without asking me first right? Been leaving on that thing in sleep mode since I first got it at launch, never had any kind of problem. Sometimes I did turn it off and leave it but I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the time it was in sleep. I was thinking about it last night and the last time I looked at it was acting a little strange, as in I think it froze. But I think it fixed itself by a simple off and on reset.

 

It seems to still charge and discharge fine. One thing I tried when I couldn't find the right size screw driver to open the back was just let it sit open all night to discharge the battery completely (it didn't work obviously). The thing still charged up and worked fine afterwards (I mean as fine as it can be).

 

To eliminate the possibility your drained battery doesn't have enough juice to keep your 3DS RAM memory lingering, you'll need to find a proper screwdriver to remove it and let the system self-discharge. This Stanley set for around $5 is commonly available across Walmart and Target stores.

• [walmart] STANLEY 66-052 6-Piece Precision Screwdriver Set
• [Target] Stanley® 6 Piece Precision Screwdriver Set - 62-052

Another possibility is that your camera module died while the 3DS was kept on that entire time. I've read several others reporting their 3DS systems being in a Death-like state of Black Screens after long periods of sleep; the weirdest remedy was to replace the camera assembly or disconnect it if it's a n3DSXL model; disconnecting the camera cable might not work when checking on the other 3DS models.

And here's where my age shows, lol.

Have you ever heard of or seen the WWII movie, Saving Private Ryan? FUBAR is an acronym of military origins, which became popularized after that movie's debut 20 years ago. If you want to see the gory and chilly faithful reenactment of the D-Day beach landing, go watch that movie in high-def video/audio. Very FUBAR.

 

A hardmod, or hardware modification for direct read & write access of the onboard NAND, will only fix a software type brick. It is indeed a last resort method reserved when:

• SysNAND Restore (by GodMode9)
  • SysNAND Restore (by Decrypt9WIP)
• CTRTransfer (11.5.0)
  • CTRTransfer (9.2.0)
    • CTRTransfer (by Decrypt9WIP)
• Lazarus3DS
• NTRboot (2nd to last resort)

do not work; ie, a stubborn bootrom Blue Screens of Death (of the softbrick variety). I don't know if this applies for miscellaneous Black Screens of Death.

So with that said...
A hardmod will not fix a hardbrick just as taking antibiotics when you're sick with viral infections will not cure you.

***

To quickly determine if your 3DS has a hardbrick, you would have to acquire another (functional) o3DS unit for A/B testing. Swapping places for the two motherboards would quickly check if your original 3DS mobo is in a working state and whether your original 3DS has a failed accessory part (YXBA daughterboard, WiFi module, camera module, speaker module, LCDs) that's not obvious of physical damage from observation alone [magnifying glass].

I would suggest you try NTRboot next with the R4i Gold 3DS Plus [1] [2], or if you don't care for a quality DS flashcart that has a Time Bomb, R4iSDHC Dual-Core 2018 [3].

If you got case to spare, buy a used donor o3DS for temporary testing then selling (just make sure you state what condition you're selling it in once you're done with it).

 

Try the NTRbootHax , you might be able to fix it.

 

Yeah about that. So one other thing I remembered these past six months is that before the original hard brick happened. I opened the system up one day and after pushing the home button to return to the game that was running in the background, the entire system froze and I had to resort to a hard powercycle (holding the power down for ten seconds) to attempt to fix it. Well when I went to turn it back on this is when the original blank screen hard brick happened. I completely forgot about this because immediately after this happened I shrugged my shoulders and went to sleep thinking it was nothing and an easy fix later. The thing is I didn't actually open it back up to play again until like four or five months later and immediately was like wait wtf, the original incident having completely slipped my mind.

I also thought about it more and it's not so much that I left the thing on the charger being charged 24/7. It's more that I left it sitting on the charger completely turned off and sitting slightly ajar. So it wasn't actually connected to the charger 90% of the time, it was just sitting on top of it. This really dose just seem like one of those rare catastrophic software errors.

 

Well I finally got around to getting an R4 gold (the newer one with the ntrboot switch inside). Is there anything I should know before I attempt to fix this thing? I kinda want to to keep the thing as stock as possible. Is there anyway to just fix it so it boots up normally again without having to install a bunch of custom firmware and the like? A backup of my nand would be nice I guess (in case this happens again). But I don't really feel the need to do much beyond that.

 

I just looked at the bootrom error codes (https://www.3dbrew.org/wiki/Bootloader) and your error code doesn't match any of the listed. The most similar one suggest an issue with the NAND connection. (Would make sense as the NAND has a limited number of R/W and you had it powered on for so much time.)

 

Dude mail it to me and I'll fix it for free. I have tons of 03ds and n3ds parts