Hacking Post your scary moments, if you had any when doing the A9LH CFW install:))

[TheAnt317]

Pretty much the entire process was one long scary moment for me. Luckily for me, everything went really well aside from the occasional Homebrew app failure to open and having to reboot to try opening it again, and the downgrade to 2.1 causing a black screen on boot with the SD card in. I feel like following the NOOB friendly guide's parts about formatting the 3DS and the SD card helped. That and taking my time, re-reading and re-checking everything twice before proceeding. The whole process of the Plailect guide took me about 7 hours.

 

[Deleted User]

Everything worked out pretty good for me besides the time that my friend closed my 3ds while it was downgrading (emunand). I just restored a backup and re-did it.

 

[retrofan_k]

A9LH'd me boyfriend his 3DS first.
Was kinda anxious when it downgraded but eh.

You A9LH'd you're boyfriend? Bet that was fun. Need to check with my Girlfriend on that myself

 

[Jiehfeng]

Nothing happened on A9LH masterace masterace. ;O;

 

[retrofan_k]

But on a serious note, I have noticed quite a few have mentioned the 2.1 black screen issue of not removing the SD card. I forgot to mention I did that too and got nervous until I remembered why.

 

[PaiiNSteven]

I bricked downgrading to 2.1, so when I did it on my other 3DS i was sweating bullets.

 

[hundshamer]

I kept getting an error with the NFIRM. Then an error occurred message. Turns out that I had the firmware bin in the root of the SD instead of in the LUMA folder.

 

[emuashui]

1. before downgrade, backing up these or those nands and whole sdcard content, with fear that what would go bad to the nnid within the sysnand (and also in emunand, both nands linked, as a previous unlinking of them went wrong ending up freezing in Data Management and was only fixed by restoring earliest backup of the sdcard content).

1.5 Not knowing how to verify if restoring TWL / AGB modification can be considered successful and thus safe to start downgrade. After several Tempers said they managed to downgrade without having TWL AGB modification undone, i proceeded as well successfully.

2. hestitating whether to downgrade from 11.0 or 10.7 emunand, as i only know for sure 11.0 is currently unlikely to downgrade without hardmod.. i finally chose 10.7 emunand for downgrade.

3. what the, booting up my n3dsxl at 2.1 gave "flicking" screen display, the guide does not mention! Luckily manged to obtain the otp file.

 

[Lush]

After installing a9lh on my o3ds and 2ds, my n3ds bricked during 2.1 downgrade . I was able to install a hard mod and restore it though after ordering the correct SD card reader. After, I installed a9lh on my n3ds just fine...

 

[Dvdxploitr]

downloading the WRONG firmware for my 3DS. I can't believe I did that.....downloaded N3DS firmware for my O3DS....BRICK! (Thankfully I had the money to buy a N3DS within a couple days)

 

[DinohScene]

You A9LH'd you're boyfriend? Bet that was fun. Need to check with my Girlfriend on that myself

Nah he injects code into me

 

[3DSPoet]

Nah he injects code into me

And when a Mommy code and a Daddy code like each other very much, a new program is formed.

 

[HenryLeonheart]

Back when Plai published the original guide with CN or Browserhax, it said specifically to NOT do it on a N3DS without a hardmod and I just thought "Ah fuck it, I'll try it anyway. If it bricks, so be it." So I did the whole procedure without a hardmod, reading everything carefully and slowly and when I booted 2.1 for the first time, the guide didn't say that you had to remove the SD card in case it didn't boot. So I was just looking at my console with a blank expression thinking about how I bricked it until I had the idea of removing the sd card to see if it booted because of past menuhax problems I had had in the past. Turns out it worked and I continued the guide. Good times

 

[hobbledehoy899]

The April Fool's version of CakesFW...

DAT FAKE BOOTROM ERROR MESSAGE

And that's why you use Luma3DS!

 

[naivegirl2411]

I had a problem that I was pretty lucky to resolve:

I just managed to get my OTP on 2.1 and needed OTP helper to restore my system back to a FW where I could access HBL. Unfortunately backing up 3ds with different versions of OTP helper leads to incompatibility and locks the user out of restoring a nand backup that isnt verified. I didnt know what to do and rushed into updating my system using my game cart (ORAS) which should have taken my system to FW 8-something IIRC. Not only did I realise afterwards that this meant I was marooned on that FW but my 3ds started to act up and prevented me from accessing ANYTHING without freezing. I managed to boot into recovery to update AND get cubic ninja the next day which I thank my lucky stars for

 

[driverdis]

I spent an hour figuring out why I could not update A9LH after using the older non-screen init CloudA9H payload.
I was getting a message telling me that the OTP.bin could not be found or was corrupt. I knew for a fact it was not corrupt and that is what bothered me the most.

Turns out, I named the A9LH folder "AL9H" and that is why it did not work.

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Second scenario:
I did a quick 10 minute A9LH install on a O3DS by downgrading to 2.1, with no 9.2 NAND backup and forgot that 11.0 was out already (10.7 was the latest when I did this method the time before)
I got to 2.1 then realized I could not use recovery to get to 10.7 to downgrade to 9.2

I ended up using a cart with 4.5 (Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity) then used PastaCFW via MSETHax to boot SysUpdater then updated to 9.2.

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Third scenario:
I downgraded my friend's brand new N3DS XL to 9.2 via @Plailect's guide then had the error occured screen when FIRM was being downgraded. I was able to fix this by rerunning SysUpdater and letting it downgrade FIRM and it succeeded.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

This is the one true scary moment:

 

[astronautlevel]

This wasn't even my first time doing it, it was more like the fourth, I forgot to select (keep a9lh) when I was transferring EmuNAND to SysNAND. Fortunately only 10.7 was out at the time and I had cubic ninja, so it didn't turn out to be a big problem in the end, but I was repeatedly slapping myself the rest of the day.

 

[starly396]

Whew, I somehow came out of it alive!

At the end of Step 3, after upgrading my RedNAND to the latest system version, I was unable to boot into it. I got the "Preparing home menu" screen, but after the progress bar finished the screen stayed black. I tried several more times, and now the progress bar wouldn't even fill before the screen faded to black. I asked a friend what to do, and they suggested "it's okay, just restore from your 9.2 rednand backup and try again." Turns out I hadn't backed it up yet, as I was out of space on my hard drive and thought this wasn't a very crucial/dangerous step. Apparently it was!

I was about to give in and sacrifice all of my old save data by reformatting, but as a last resort I tried deleting the theme data after stumbling upon https://www.reddit.com/r/3DS/commen..._to_backup_your_3ds_folders_on_its_sd/ctoqubt.

Lo and behold, the progress bar filled again and it booted properly! Strangely I had only updated to 9.9 instead of 11, but updating once more fixed everything else! It was smooth sailing after that, having fun configuring my boot manager! al9h ftw

 

[Deleted member 386348]

Your average OH MY GOD MY SCREEN IS BLACK AFTER 2.1 AND MY SD CArd is still in...