Hacking I bricked and un-bricked my 3DS yesterday. Now I'm trying to understand how I managed to do either.

Ender3Guy

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Hi all,
Two days ago I purchased an N3DSXL and modded it using the guide. Yesterday, happy me brought my 3DS with me to work in sleep mode with MHXX open and 3D on.
When I opened the system during my break, the game had frozen. After checking to make sure that the game could not be exited via the home button, I decided to force restart via Rosalina's reboot option.
I opened the Rosalina menu, then thought better of it and wondered whether putting the game in sleep mode, then taking it out again could un-freeze it. Without closing the Rosalina menu, I closed my 3DS, waited 5 seconds, then re-opened it. I realized I'd left Rosalina open and closed it, ready to have another shot - but as soon as I hit B, both screens went black.
I tried using the appropriate keystrokes to open Rosalina, scroll down, and reboot, but nothing happened after 10 seconds so I powered off by holding the power button.
Upon reboot, my system stayed on a black screen for about 10 seconds before flashing the wireless LED on and off a few times. It repeated this about every 10 seconds for a good minute before I powered it off by holding the power button.

I decided to attempt a few basic fixes. I couldn't access my SD to try and boot without it since i didn't have a screwdriver, so I decided to start with GodMode9.
I successfully accessed GodMode9 and, after some deliberation, replaced both Boot.firm and Boot.3dsx on the SD card with a secondary backup I've embedded into my NAND. I then deleted all Luma config files, and removed the last few exploit files that GM9's cleanup script hadn't removed. I then powered off the console and let it sit for 10 seconds before rebooting.

The result was a success. Luma booted successfully and I was greeted by my home menu. As soon as the home menu opened, a notification regarding play coins popped up.

My own personal theory to all of this is that walking around at work triggered the notification about play coins which did something to XX's 3D causing it to freeze. Beyond that, I'm lost - is anyone here able to make an educated guess at what happened?

Update:
I found two error dumps on the SD from the two times the 3DS failed to boot with a flashing wireless LED. I've placed the data below:

Error type: generic

Process ID: 20
Process name: gsp
Process title ID: 0x0004013000001c02

Address: 0x00105268
Error code: 0xf8a02bfe

Based on what I've found on 3DBrew, GSP appears to be linked to the QTM service which handles face-tracking on N3DS. This seems to corroborate well with my theory that the 3D is what froze XX.
 
Last edited by Ender3Guy,
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@TurdPooCharger the mighty I summon thee from the depths of GBATemp!
*reads first post*

:O

... Ya, I'm currently not in the position to go on an wild tangent to try to explain what exactly went wrong with your n3DSXL. If it's anything like computers having too many web browser tabs opened or lots of programs running in the background, your crash sounds similar where too much memory resources are taxed or too many tasks/commands are given to the CPU to process in a short span of time.

Like this:
 

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