Nintendo Switch eMMC swap

[WolfLink115]

Hey guys, so my friend updated his current Nintendo Switch recently and tried loading up Pokemon Violet, however all of his Pokemon were mysteriously gone and it was as though the game was completely wiped. Since there is no cloud save option for that game, he couldn't restore the game save.

I modchipped his console for him using the Picofly, in hopes that maybe his Pokemon Violet data was stored somewhere in the console but it wasn't there at all. He remembered saving the eMMC from his old Switch, which at least had a lot of his old data stored (14 years worth of Pokemon that were transferred from old Pokemon games as well, however the charging port on that one died and he pulled the eMMC from it and threw the board out) and I was wanting to try getting the Pokemon from the old eMMC, however since the old console wasn't modded, we don't have the prod.keys or any of the old decryption keys therefore we can't do anything yet.

I dumped all of the partitions off the old eMMC using my modded switch, and was hoping that I could somehow find a way to decrypt the USER partition but have had no luck.

Is there a way to get the data out of that partition without the keys? I appreciate any and all help. Thanks I'm advance!

 

[thesjaakspoiler]

If you have the old switch then you should be able to get the keys as they are for the APU, not the emmc.
He would have used those keys for preparing his new emmc as well back then.

Without those keys, there isn't much you can do as everything on the emmc is encrypted.

Afaik, save games are stored on the USER partition in a folder with the id of the game.
Usually if you delete the game, the save games are still there.
I don't know if this is also the case with Pokemon.
I don't know if tools like checkpoint can see such saves without the game installed.
They might only show savegames for games that are installed.

 

[WolfLink115]

If you have the old switch then you should be able to get the keys as they are for the APU, not the emmc.
He would have used those keys for preparing his new emmc as well back then.

Without those keys, there isn't much you can do as everything on the emmc is encrypted.

Afaik, save games are stored on the USER partition in a folder with the id of the game.
Usually if you delete the game, the save games are still there.
I don't know if this is also the case with Pokemon.
I don't know if tools like checkpoint can see such saves without the game installed.
They might only show savegames for games that are installed.

We don't have the old switch board, he threw that out a couple years ago. Another friend of ours recommended keeping the eMMC just in case but I had a feeling it wouldn't be possible to get the saves off the eMMC.

The game wasn't uninstalled or anything, all that he did was update to the latest firmware (at the time it was 20.1.0) and attempted to load the game up. The same data for every other game he has is still intact, the only one that is gone is Pokemon Violet. I looked it up awhile ago and a lot of people have seemed to have the issue mainly on the Switch 2, which is very unusual. But either way, 14 years worth of Pokemon, rare Pokemon, and a lot of legendary and shiny Pokemon are now gone and unless we are able to get into the userdata partition of the old eMMC, we aren't gonna be able to get those old Pokemon back huh?

 

[l7777]

We don't have the old switch board, he threw that out a couple years ago. Another friend of ours recommended keeping the eMMC just in case but I had a feeling it wouldn't be possible to get the saves off the eMMC.

The game wasn't uninstalled or anything, all that he did was update to the latest firmware (at the time it was 20.1.0) and attempted to load the game up. The same data for every other game he has is still intact, the only one that is gone is Pokemon Violet. I looked it up awhile ago and a lot of people have seemed to have the issue mainly on the Switch 2, which is very unusual. But either way, 14 years worth of Pokemon, rare Pokemon, and a lot of legendary and shiny Pokemon are now gone and unless we are able to get into the userdata partition of the old eMMC, we aren't gonna be able to get those old Pokemon back huh?

It's all about the encryption keys. If he doesn't have the keys from the old Switch there is no way to read the data. That is the entire point of encryption.

 

[akq]

We don't have the old switch board, he threw that out a couple years ago. Another friend of ours recommended keeping the eMMC just in case but I had a feeling it wouldn't be possible to get the saves off the eMMC.

The game wasn't uninstalled or anything, all that he did was update to the latest firmware (at the time it was 20.1.0) and attempted to load the game up. The same data for every other game he has is still intact, the only one that is gone is Pokemon Violet. I looked it up awhile ago and a lot of people have seemed to have the issue mainly on the Switch 2, which is very unusual. But either way, 14 years worth of Pokemon, rare Pokemon, and a lot of legendary and shiny Pokemon are now gone and unless we are able to get into the userdata partition of the old eMMC, we aren't gonna be able to get those old Pokemon back huh?

Regive your pokemon from pkhex and don’t feel bad just tell you that one time you had the real pokemon