Hacking [IPatched] Updating Hekate from v5.0.0 - should I do it?

[Francesca]

User of an ipatched 4.1.0 switch here. Used noahc3's website to set up homebrew / CFW on my Switch, but still lacking an emunand. I want my Switch to be working properly when the new FE game comes out and noah is taking his time with the emunand part of the tutorial, so I decided I'd risk and try to get things done on my own as I don't want to miss out on playing the game early (I believe I couldn't hack AND play the game if I didn't set up emunand and play the cartridge on that since it's a new game and I can't update past 4.1.0 on an ipatched, correct?).

It looks like help is short at the current stage of Switch hacking, but seeing how GRoberts took his time to type up a very detailed post about setting up emuMMC on an patched Switch, I thought I should seize the chance and try to sort things out on my own reading what he did.

1) The first thing I'm wondering is whether updating from Hekate 5.0.0 to the latest one (iirc the next one) is necessary or useful. I don't actually know how it's done? I've already followed the tutorial for setting up Hekate and it's on my Switch right now. Do I just wipe away everything from my SD Card and do the whole thing again? Parts of the set up again? Completely lost here.

2) Every once in a while, somebody posts a thread here saying they bricked their Switch doing something, and everybody jumps at the poster saying 'see, this is what happens when you fuck things up'. This is fucking terrifying tbqh, when you're somebody like me who doesn't understand what she's doing when it's about hacking. I understood about autoRCM being a no-no, but apparently some programs now detect an ipatched switch and just disable autoRCM so that you don't make a mistake?

To paraphrase myself, before I begin trying to set up emunand (hopefully) today, what are some other things I should avoid? Downgrading is a bad and useless idea? I just want to set up emuMMC and update it to the latest firmware, as far as I understand.

 

[Kubas_inko]

You shouldn't update, otherwise, you'd lose CFW support (for quite some time).

TLDR how to setup EmuMMC: Create +-32Gb partition on your SD. Use hekate 5.0.0 and up, select the correct partition and install EmuMMC to it.

1. The newest stuff is usually more stable, has more features and fewer bugs (and so on). To update hekate or AMS, you just copy&paste&overwrite.
2. You can only brick if you do some really stupid stuff (like downgrading without knowing what are you doing, installing unsafe nsps and so on). If you don't understand, don't do it. Easy as that. Also, the first thing everyone should always do is a NAND backup (with patched units you should backup BIS keys as well but backup anything you can). People don't do it and then they brick their devices. What else should they expect then? The golden rule that people don't care about...
Hopefully, Hekate does the autoRCM stuff. I know that choidujournx does that.

Before you did anything, you should have backed up your NAND and keys. But you can do that anytime (and if you haven't installed any nsps and such, you NAND might be still clean).

 

[LeMageFro]

To update hekate you just need to extract the latest archive to your SD card, no need to wipe it before.

You can't brick your switch by creating an emuMMC partition don't worry. It won't modify the internal memory of your system (what we call sysNAND, or eMMC in the case of the switch), it will just copy it to the second available partition of more than 30GB on your SD.

After creating your emuMMC partition you will need to update it, but since for now it's not possible to boot an emuMMC partition without custom firmware (it will be in the future) you shouldn't update it via Horizon (it's not advised to go online while using CFW because it can get you banned). You'll need to update either with the homebrew ChoiDuJourNX or with the FA cartridge. Also you will want to be 100% sure that you booted your emuMMC and not your sysNAND before updating, so a good way to tell them apart in a blink is to set a different theme for each.

Otherwise you seem to have the right attitude toward hacking, if you try to read and understand as much as possible things will get clearer and you'll soon understand what you are doing and how it generally works. A lot of people brick their consoles because they don't have the patience to read more than 10 lines of a tutorial and just want to rush everything so they end up doing silly mistakes, but it doesn't seem to be your case.

Finally as Kubas_inko said : start by creating a nand backup with hekate (Boot0, Boot1 and rawnand.bin), then copy it to a safe place on your computer. It will be 30Go but you can archive it in a zip to drastically reduce its size.