Hacking Help to unbrick wii with preloader

[AlbertEin]

Hi guys, a friend of mine got his wii softmoded some time ago, and everything worked great.

A couple of days ago he installed some crap trying to be able to play the new mario game (i don't know what exactly he installed but i can ask if it is necessary), all he got was a wii unable to play discs, he (wrongly) thought it was the preloader fault and tried to mess with it.

The result? bricked wii.

Now he's getting the damaged files message, like this:


It seems like a banner brick, maybe caused by preloader fucking a wrong version of the system menu or something like that.

He can still access preloader, so, he should be able to launch apps from his SD card, and now he is still looking for help.

We found a tutorial on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAwwUtjZUn4...player_embedded

But i'm not eager to try it out right away without asking first, it seems the guy in the video is just installing the system menu IOS and the system menu, and i think that if he reinstalls the system menu he's going to overwrite the preloader losing any hope to unbrick his wii if anything goes wrong.

So guys, what do you recomend me to do?, follow the video instructions? run a downgrader? run cioscorp?. I want to take the safest route to get the wii working.

Thank you very much, any help is higly appreciated.

 

[dai-a]

Ok well you can start by telling us what region he is and what crap he installed.

That would help a lot. BTW Cioscorp is only a modification of IOS's so you can run back ups through the disc channel. It wouldn't help worth shit.

 

[KiiWii]

looks like the need to reinstal preloader.

 

[longtom1]

he could have just installed the IOS that preloader was using that'll give you a garbled system files corrupt message

 

[AlbertEin]

It's a NTSC-USA, he originally modded his wii with softmii 2.1, that means preloader, runned anyregionchanger, installed cioscorp, etc.

I'll post an update whit the stuff that he isntalled after, that got him bricked in a hour o so (i need to ask him for to url of his guide to figure it out what the heck he did)

 

[longtom1]

No bootmii????

 

[AlbertEin]

At the time of his first softmod he didn't installed softmii, and i think that the new stuff that he did included the installation of softmii, BUT he installed as a IOS, and anyway his system was already borked.

So no softmii, only preloader avaible

 

[KiiWii]

I'm 99% sure this can be fixed by reinstalling preloader.

 

[longtom1]

I'm 99% sure this can be fixed by reinstalling preloader.

that's what I was thinking but wasn't that sure

 

[AlbertEin]

If i reinstall preloader but the error is caused by another thing will the preloader keep working? Should i install the newest version? the original version? some specific version?

Thank you.

 

[MadClaw]

The same exact thing happened to me. All you have to do is re-install preloader.

Just re-install the same version.

 

[bula]

What SM? He screwed up with SM's IOS. Reinstalling SM.wad with wadmanager will do it and the reinstall preloader, just make sure you install the same SM as the one is on the wii currently.

 

[AlbertEin]

Ok, here's what happended:

He upgraded to 4.0, and then he ran the upgrade for the nintendo shop and downloaded Opera.

But then he couldn't run games using the disc channel.

So far so good, he couldn't run games but his wii was working, and then he thought "it must be preloader" but he didn't knew the reset while powering on trick, so he openned the preloader INSTALLER from the homebrew channel and installed it.


He upgraded to 4.0 using wanikoko firmware upgrader 4.0 that you can find on his website (published on march 26th).
He upgraded the shop channel using 4.2 Shop Installer by Mark. R, i've got the link of the exact file he used but i don't know if its allowed posting it here.

He has preloader 0.28 and i'm not sure about his system menu, is it 4.0 or is it 4.2 ? (I'm don't know much about that stuff, my modded console is still on 3.2 and i don't plan to update it)

So what was it? preloader fucked system menu 4.0? what i should do? reinstall preloader or the system menu? should i run the wanikoko update again?


Thank you

 

[AlbertEin]

Yup, that was fixed updating preloader to 0.29, thank you all!

 

[tj_cool]

For people who don't know what happened:

When preloader installs itself, it puts a small patch in the system menu IOS so that it would work with the system menu's new location (preloader takes the place of the system menu, and moves it somewhere else).

By installing cIOSCORP, the IOS preloader used got overwritten, thus removing the patch of preloader.
Since preloader can't correctly use the system menu IOS, it will fail to load the system menu correctly (causing a corruption error)

As result, this can be fixed by running the preloader installer again (allowing it to patch the IOS again).

 

[leondmsmith]

Also its worth noting that Preloader .28 is for system menu 3.x which is why he got the corrupt message screen, he needed preloader.29 onwards as that is for sysetm menu 4.x

When correct version of preloader is installed, you can install CIOSCORP afterwards and preloader will still work and so will your correct system menu you wont need to reinstall it. i have done it on every wii i hacked and it has never failed.

It failed in above example as it was looking for the incorrect IOS as it was the wrong version of preloader.