Question about Formatting Wii with Homebrew Channel Installed

[JuanMena]

I can't seem to find a proper answer. All questions are about "virginizing a Wii" which is not what I'm looking for.

I'm trying to install some WiiWare Wads, and some are absolutely not installing no matter what I use (SD or USB FAT32 with 32k cluster size) and my SD card which has all my WiiWare games is kinda buggy.
So I'd like to completely reformat my SD card with SD Card Formatter, and that means that I also want to uninstall every single ticket/title from my Wii's memory... and that means a complete Format.

My question is: What happens to cIOS? What happens to PriiLoader, BootMii? Are those untouched? If I format my Wii do I have to reinstall everything from scratch?
From Homebrew Channel (which will obviously get deleted) to cIOS and everything else?

 

[KleinesSinchen]

I've not much knowledge about this on Wii in particular so wait for other replies. Not a great fan of the deletion method myself, but frankly I should do some tests in this direction on the Wii.

Old Preloader (not Priiloader) versions are known to cause problems on format. Preloader does not find the System Menu anymore. This has been fixed ages ago.
Factory reset probably doesn't delete much but the user profile (installed channels, save data, Mii).

There is no reason for Format System Memory to touch (c)IOS. It shouldn't touch boot2 as this is a dangerous operation. The deletion may not touch parts of the firmware. How is a stock console supposed to restore the firmware? It can't!

All in all many people have a wrong perception of what a "factory reset" does on any device. More often than not it does not restore a device to factory defaults – this would include (unwanted for the manufacturer) firmware downgrade and would require a second (money!) firmware chip containing a full copy of the default.

 

[XFlak]

If the issue is with your sd, u can just format that.

If u do a format of the wii itself, u will lose content like channels and mii's. Ios's, priiloader, bootmii will be untouched. Anything u lose can be reinstalled

 

[JuanMena]

Thanks both for quick replies.

I was fearing that some tickets might get corrupted as the wads I've tried to install I placed them in USB.

It seems WadManager and USB doesn't get along too well as it's hang up on me in the middle of WiiWare wads installations.
I just turned off my Wii after waiting 15+ minutes in a wad that got stuck in "Please wait installing ticked #07".
Turned back on my Wii, loaded WadManager again and uninstalled the tickets with the same wad file. And I got curious: "What if this wad installation has corrupted something. Would a Wii Format wipe out any corruption/left over tickets?"... hence the question.

Post automatically merged: Jan 7, 2024

I can confirm:

WAD-Manager 1.8 and USB doesn't get along well.

I just tried to install the same "troublesome" WAD files from SD and they installed fine.