Is my wiiu dead?

[Taleweaver]

Here's the situation: I got a launch day wiiu back in the day, did one of the earlier hacks (haxchi 2.3 according to files on the SD card. Oh, and set up as cold boot) but then completely lost all track of further updates. Both from hacks (I never attempted tiramisu) or from nintendo (I can't say which version I have, though it did work fine with that hack). Simply put: it worked fine.

It pretty much retired for years and never even got turned on unless nephew and niece came around for some mario kart (Christmas 2022...probably). I pretty much had the same idea for last Christmas...but I found out during the event that my wiiu failed to start.

I remember it booting straight into cold boot haxchi, and from there to the (hacked) system menu. It doesn't show that anymore, but is stuck in nintendo's basic "loading" intro screen. It doesn't show up the menu or anything else.

At first glance, all files on the SD card seemed fine...except the SD card is stuck in read-only mode (I've had this happen before, though never on a quality brand sandisk). Figuring that was the cause, I replaced it (note: not with a same 32GB sandisk type, but a 64 micro-SD EDO Plus samsung one+adapter). The new one is formatted in FAT32 and has the same files as the old ones. That didn't change anything of the error.
Online I found that simply reinstalling haxchi (that is: placing the files on the SD card as they were) could help, but...not in my case. Then again, I'm not sure if this is caused by haxchi to begin with. Due to me not being able to do anything on the wiiu itself, troubleshooting is pretty limited.

So...does anyone have an idea what this could be and/or how to fix it? Are there shortcuts to starting the wiiu in troubleshooting mode (akin to priiloader on the wii) ? Would "updating" to tiramisu in this state do anything usefull?

Thanks for your help.

 

[linuxares]

Sadly you might have Hynix NAND that is dead/dying. Can you open it up?

https://nintendosoup.com/recently-reported-wii-u-failures-due-to-specific-brand-of-nand-chip/

 

[SDIO]

You can see if anything changes if you boot without SD or by holding A or B on the gamepad during boot

 

[Taleweaver]

You can see if anything changes if you boot without SD or by holding A or B on the gamepad during boot

Forgot to mention that one: tried it, doesn't make a difference, I'm afraid.

Sadly you might have Hynix NAND that is dead/dying. Can you open it up?

https://nintendosoup.com/recently-reported-wii-u-failures-due-to-specific-brand-of-nand-chip/

Ouch... That's certainly a possibility. I'll see later if I can open it (never done that).

 

[SDIO]

Then I would suggest you try UDPIH. Then you also don't have to open it for now

 

[V10lator]

It could also be caused by a system update, maybe from standby mode after that christmas gaming mode session a few years ago. So resetting the boot title ID might help here. Anyway, as SDIO said try UDPIH and if that works dump the logs, then zip and upload them. This way we can see the root of your issue and don't have to guess.

//EDIT: Oh and if UDPIH works maybe also just try to reset the boot title ID before dumping the logs. It won't harm anything (other than disabling coldboot haxchi) and with some luck it might be enough to make the Wii U boot again.