Hey all,
So here’s a weird issue… I’ve been using a hacked Wii for years, ever since the internal NAND on my launch-day Wii started dying about 4 or 5 years ago. Prior to that. I was getting corrupted Mii Channel, losing Miis, and corrupt game saves.
Anyway, for the past 3 years or so I’ve been running emuNAND via UNEEK+DI connected to a Seagate 3.5” 320GB 3Gbps SATA HDD in a Vantec USB 2 case. There have been a few hiccups here and there where the Wii would stop recognizing the HDD, but I could always fix it by replacing cert.sys, settings.txt, etc. I’ve also kept a backup to another exact duplicate HDD (purchased at the same time, same model, in the same case, using software to do a block-level copy).
So last week, the primary HDD gave me the click-of-death. It won’t mount in Mac OS or Windows. No problem, I thought, that’s what the backup is for. Only it doesn’t work! I’ve tried running disk utilities in Mac and Windows, which it passes without problems. I’ve tried putting the HDD in the same Vantec case as the original, in case there is a chipset difference. I’ve tried reinstalling all the typical UNEEK+DI trouble files that can get corrupted. I’ve tried reinstalling virgin files from ModMii, including a clean emuNAND. I’ve tried re-hacking my Wii with the ModMii wizard, and I’ve even reformatted the drive just to make sure it’s FAT32 MBR 32k sectors. I’ve tried using example files included on another forum that are supposed to be guaranteed to load.
Nothing works! I’m banging my head against the wall here, since the exact same setup (Wii, SD card, USB cable, case, HDD make and model, formatting, and files) just plain doesn’t work where a week ago it did. And every step to fix it (new Vantec case, new USB cable, all the software mods as above) doesn’t work either.
So where I’m at now is a Wii with HBC, BootMii as boot2, all the patched IOS files from ModMii 6.3.1 Wizard, WiiFlow, and switch2uneek installed. WiiFlow can see the HDD and can extract the internal NAND to it, and it can rip games from the DVD to the HDD. Trying to boot a HDD game from WiiFlow with emuNAND results in a crash to main menu, and trying to boot a disc game from WiiFlow with emuNAND results in a freeze and hard reset needed. Trying to use switch2uneek results in a hard freeze requiring reset after it’s moved my subfolders, and changing bootmiiuneek to bootmii on the SD card results in a black screen and the drive light on the Wii blinking once (which should mean "TMD of the requested title is missing”). This also needs a hard reset.
The kicker is that now when running off real NAND I’m also getting a ton of freezes and crashes. BootMii scanned the NAND and hasn’t found any new bad blocks, so I can only assume that my Wii is really messed up in some other way...
So any advice on getting back to where things were a week ago (working emuNAND, booting games of HDD, everything working just fine) would be much appreciated! Otherwise I’m about ready to just give up and say the Wii had a nice run of 8 years… :-(
So here’s a weird issue… I’ve been using a hacked Wii for years, ever since the internal NAND on my launch-day Wii started dying about 4 or 5 years ago. Prior to that. I was getting corrupted Mii Channel, losing Miis, and corrupt game saves.
Anyway, for the past 3 years or so I’ve been running emuNAND via UNEEK+DI connected to a Seagate 3.5” 320GB 3Gbps SATA HDD in a Vantec USB 2 case. There have been a few hiccups here and there where the Wii would stop recognizing the HDD, but I could always fix it by replacing cert.sys, settings.txt, etc. I’ve also kept a backup to another exact duplicate HDD (purchased at the same time, same model, in the same case, using software to do a block-level copy).
So last week, the primary HDD gave me the click-of-death. It won’t mount in Mac OS or Windows. No problem, I thought, that’s what the backup is for. Only it doesn’t work! I’ve tried running disk utilities in Mac and Windows, which it passes without problems. I’ve tried putting the HDD in the same Vantec case as the original, in case there is a chipset difference. I’ve tried reinstalling all the typical UNEEK+DI trouble files that can get corrupted. I’ve tried reinstalling virgin files from ModMii, including a clean emuNAND. I’ve tried re-hacking my Wii with the ModMii wizard, and I’ve even reformatted the drive just to make sure it’s FAT32 MBR 32k sectors. I’ve tried using example files included on another forum that are supposed to be guaranteed to load.
Nothing works! I’m banging my head against the wall here, since the exact same setup (Wii, SD card, USB cable, case, HDD make and model, formatting, and files) just plain doesn’t work where a week ago it did. And every step to fix it (new Vantec case, new USB cable, all the software mods as above) doesn’t work either.
So where I’m at now is a Wii with HBC, BootMii as boot2, all the patched IOS files from ModMii 6.3.1 Wizard, WiiFlow, and switch2uneek installed. WiiFlow can see the HDD and can extract the internal NAND to it, and it can rip games from the DVD to the HDD. Trying to boot a HDD game from WiiFlow with emuNAND results in a crash to main menu, and trying to boot a disc game from WiiFlow with emuNAND results in a freeze and hard reset needed. Trying to use switch2uneek results in a hard freeze requiring reset after it’s moved my subfolders, and changing bootmiiuneek to bootmii on the SD card results in a black screen and the drive light on the Wii blinking once (which should mean "TMD of the requested title is missing”). This also needs a hard reset.
The kicker is that now when running off real NAND I’m also getting a ton of freezes and crashes. BootMii scanned the NAND and hasn’t found any new bad blocks, so I can only assume that my Wii is really messed up in some other way...
So any advice on getting back to where things were a week ago (working emuNAND, booting games of HDD, everything working just fine) would be much appreciated! Otherwise I’m about ready to just give up and say the Wii had a nice run of 8 years… :-(