It is possible that it would work and you will have saved yourself a bunch of time. It's also possible that you'd get a normal partial that you can fix with recovery mode. Or, it's also possible that you could get some nasty partial that would be hard to recover from. Guess it depends on if you think it's worth the risk or not.
Now that I think about it, I might even try it on one of my old 3ds's that has a busted circle pad since I don't really care what becomes of it.