My N3DS was set up with Gateway. The emunand and sysnand was linked as all the games I installed in the emunand shows up in the sysnand as well.
I tried to back up the emunand with emunand tool before messing around but the tool could not find anything to back up. Is this because I forgot the "format emunand" step in the gateway menu when I set everything up?
I tried to unlink the two by entering into emunand and format system memory with the N3DS micro sd taken out. It rebooted and I had to go through resetting the date, etc. Now all the cia games I installed are gone from both sys and emunand...
Is there anyway to get the n3DS to recognise it again?
Or do I have to redo everything from scratch.
Thanks
Because you didn't perform the "Format Emunand" setup, you never created that second partition on your SD card, so you were running your normal SysNand in Gateway mode the whole time. Think of "Gateway Mode" as a wrapper that allows you to use the Gateway card and any installed CIAs, rather than its own system. Setting up EmuNand will create a partition that uses about 1 GB of space on your card. The partition won't appear in Windows because Windows won't understand how to read it, but you will see the "capacity" of the card drop by about 1 GB, and the partition will appear in Disk Management if you want to see it.
Because your card was removed when you did the formatting, you should still have the files on the SD card, but the newly-formatted system has a different ID and won't use them. If you made a backup of your nand before formatting, you can use the Gateway menu to restore that backup, which will allow you to use the files as well as recover anything that was on SysNand. If you did not back up your nand, then you are unfortunately out of luck on that front. You might be able to extract saved games out of the old directory, but I'm not sure how to do that, or if it's even possible. I would suggest doing some research on that. If you can't (or decide it's not worth the effort), then you might as well delete the old directory to clear off the space.
The "Setup Emunand" step will format the system's SD card, so you should copy everything off of it before you do that. My recommendation would be to do the following:
- Copy contents of system's SD card to your computer
- Start the launcher and enter the menu
- Select "Format Emunand" from the menu.
- - Your recently-formatted SysNand will now be copied to the EmuNand partition. This will include the internal ID it uses to determine which files are "yours" as opposed to a card being shared between multiple systems.
- Copy the contents of the system's SD card back onto the card
- Format the System Memory of the SysNand to unlink the two, if you choose to. (You mentioned being on a N3DS, which I believe cannot be downgraded, or else I'd have listed that as another optional step.)
This basically would set it up so that everything you were doing in SysNand is now on EmuNand, and the new SysNand is basically not used at all. If you entered anything like your Nintendo Network ID into SysNand, that setting gets copied over to EmuNand. If you plan on using SysNand a lot (as opposed to EmuNand in "Classic Mode", for playing retail cards), you might choose to take different steps, but I haven't researched much into that case.
Once I unlinked mine, I took a couple extra steps.
- I cleared out the home screen on SysNand and added a set of folders to spell out "SYSNAND", to make it very obvious in case I found myself on SysNand by accident.
- I added a few folders to EmuNand to spell out "EMU", for the same reason.
- I changed the network settings on SysNand to have all three connections have invalid data. That way, it won't access the internet to see updates, and going into the settings will have an obvious reminder to not add valid settings. I suppose it won't stop it from accessing SpotPass Relays, but I only ever stay in SysNand long enough to get to EmuNand.
- I could have changed the theme settings, but I liked the default colors, and the folders make it exceedingly clear which is which, so I haven't bothered. Plus, when I was experimenting with it, I hadn't figured out how to "unlink" them yet, so it wasn't working right. I might mess with it again now, make SysNand jarringly red.
I hope this helps make things more clear. Good luck with setting things up.
