Hacking How to backup nand in case of bricking ?

[androgynus]

Hello all,

So yeah the title is quite self-explainatory there. I softmodded my wii-u and got cbhc working and stuff. All is good there but i am used to have a nand backup when im softmodding 3ds so if anything goes bad i can roll back to a previous backup and so on. I just wanna know basically if something exist like that that would allow me to nand backup my wii u in case somehow an update get through in any way or someone delete a certain channel that bricks my wii u.

 

[OfficialBrony]

If you have put a CFW on your Wii u it creates a nand backup.


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[RedSoloFox]

I believe currently you have to create a rednand and use dimok's tool to back it up from the sd card.

 

[x65943]

Just be extra careful, because hardmodding the wiiu is more complicated than hardmodding the 3ds, and so far no one's tried reflashing the nand backup created via the rednand dumping tool.

 

[Leeful]

Just be extra careful, because hardmodding the wiiu is more complicated than hardmodding the 3ds, and so far no one's tried reflashing the nand backup created via the rednand dumping tool.

I have reflashed the mlc.full.img backup from rednand / dimok's tool via hardmod and it worked fine. Post Here I have not tried the slc or slccmpt yet but the backup for the eMMC worked as it should so I dont see why the other 2 wouold not work also.

@RedSoloFox is correct, you need to create a rednand and then extract the nand backups with dimoks' sdio_nand_extractor.

As @x65943 said the hardmod for the WiiU is a lot more complicated than the 3DS.
Basically you have to do 2 different hardmods to do a complete restore. One using an SD Card reader(a bit like on the 3DS) for the eMMC nand (WiiU Internal Storage) and another one for the TSOP nand (WiiU and V-Wii nand).

In the long run you would only need to do a hardmod if you messed anything up so for the moment just having a set of backups using rednand and dimok' tool you should be safe.

 

[androgynus]

Mneh i dont really care if hardmod is more complicated, im used at soldering so in case shiz happen, i could do it. So Rednand and Dimok tool hun ? I just want to make sure, cause i dont really wanna go rednand ( i find my wii u quite great as it is right now) and as in OP, im already setuped with CBHC and mocha. Im going to check to this tonight, just want to make sure CFW+ CBHC and rednand is safe to combine.

Thanks for the help people.

 

[Leeful]

@androgynus You dont have to use rednand once you have created one. You just go through the process of creating a rednand to get a backup of your nands. Once that is done you can re-format your SD Card to get rid of the rednand partition on it and carry on as you did before.

Just make sure to make a backup of your SD Card before creating rednand and use seeprom2sd to get a backup of your seeprom and otp2sd to get a backup of your otp.

Once all this is done you will have:
mlc.full.img = backup of Wii U Internal Storage
slc.full.img = backup of Wii U Nand chip
slccmpt.full.img = backup of Virtual Wii Nand Chip
otp.bin = backup of your otp keys
seeprom.bin = backup of your seeprom keys

 

[pelago]

I'm very interested in this topic too. Is anyone able to create a good newbie-friendly step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to do this?

EDIT: I mean a tutorial covering the process of using software to backup the NANDs. I realise that flashing them back via hardware will be very much not something a newbie can do.

 

[androgynus]

@pelago what do you need more ? Everything has already been covered in here on how to create nands backup and i am pretty sure that a topic already exist on how to flash back nand on wii u.

 

[Kafluke]

I'm very interested in this topic too. Is anyone able to create a good newbie-friendly step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to do this?

EDIT: I mean a tutorial covering the process of using software to backup the NANDs. I realise that flashing them back via hardware will be very much not something a newbie can do.

There are plenty of tutorials for redNAND. Go through the steps and just stop after doing the full backup and transferring to your PC

 

[pelago]

@androgynus You dont have to use rednand once you have created one. You just go through the process of creating a rednand to get a backup of your nands. Once that is done you can re-format your SD Card to get rid of the rednand partition on it and carry on as you did before.

Just make sure to make a backup of your SD Card before creating rednand and use seeprom2sd to get a backup of your seeprom and otp2sd to get a backup of your otp.

Once all this is done you will have:
mlc.full.img = backup of Wii U Internal Storage
slc.full.img = backup of Wii U Nand chip
slccmpt.full.img = backup of Virtual Wii Nand Chip
otp.bin = backup of your otp keys
seeprom.bin = backup of your seeprom keys

Hi. Thank you for this. Just to let you know that I have successfully done this. I noticed that, when setting up Mocha, if I ticked to redirect OTP and SEEPROM, I could also extract those files from the hidden partition using https://github.com/dimok789/sdio_nand_manager rather than having to use seeprom2sd and otp2sd too. You have to have run Mocha at least once after created the rednand for it to create the hidden OTP and SEEPROM.

For interest, I did also run seeprom2sd and otp2sd and they created the same files, except I notice that one byte in seeprom.bin increases each time I dump it, which I'm guessing is a number-of-boots count or similar.

@dimok Many thanks for all your tools. For those of us who think it's a good idea to have backups, is it possible to create (or has someone already created) a tool, maybe nand2sd, that would dump the NANDs to files on a FAT-formatted SD card, rather than repartitioning like the Mocha rednand setup does? That would make it easier to backup without having to screw around with the SD card too much.

 

[Keylogger]

Making a Wii U NAND dump is useless because you can't restore it

 

[Kafluke]

Useless but just for now. Someday it may be helpful to have those backups. Just a precaution never hurt anybody

 

[Anonyamalious]

So still no way to restore from back up? I have all mlc.full.img, otp.bin, seeprom.bin, slc.full.img, slccmpt.full.img. My Coldhax installation was weird, I tried to uninstall it but it said something about VWare not exist and wouldn't let me. I also couldn't bring up the Coldhax menu by holding home. Finally I format a USB drive and then it froze on the Mocha screen. I can still get into Mii maker by holding B and playing around with the settings. By if there's a way to restore that would be great.