Hacking Reformatting/Backing Up My Wii, Any Tips/Warnings?

[LeonardoGolden]

My Wii's been acting up recently. It could be the homebrew or the hardware itself, but I'm not sure at this point. I've tried updating it to 4.3 (it was previously on 4.1) and re-exploiting it but it's still finicky. Video sometimes refuses to output, .WADs installed onto the SD card sometimes won't boot, GameCube games won't boot the first time, syscheck won't even run anymore; it's a mess.

I've ran out of options, so I've decided to restore it to its factory settings. Now, I want to keep my saves and everything, so I was thinking of just turning off the copy protect flag and copying all my saves to my SD card, then putting them back in once it's done restoring. Would that be feasible?

Also, since my SD card might be part of the problem, I want to start fresh with it too. I have a bunch of games on it, though, and I want to keep them, so I was thinking of extracting them as .WADs and re-installing them once the Wii is reformatted. Is that possible? I remember reading about a homebrew app that could do this, but I've forgotten the name.

Being inexperienced in backing up a Wii, I'm asking for a little insight. Would my methods be okay? Is there a simpler method? Anything I should be wary of while doing this?

If all else fails and the Wii's hardware is dying, would I be able to transfer this backup onto a new one?

I hope someone can help. Thanks!

 

[person66]

The format option on the Wii System Settings doesn't really format it, it just erases your saves and channels. If you actually want to clear everything, you could look in to ohneschwanzenegger, but using that could cause a brick, especially if you don't have bootmii as boot2.

For backing up saves you could use something SaveGame Manager GX and just copy all the saves to your sd card.

The channels on your sd card are stored in the private folder, along with any saves copied using the Wii's system settings. SaveGame Manager GX uses its own folder on the root of the sd card. Just sbackup the private folder and SaveGame Manager GX's folder and you should be good to go.

It sounds like your wii does have some hardware issues though. Video not outputting sometimes sounds more hardware than software, and if the issues you get happen randomly, and are not always reproducible, then that points to hardware as well.

 

[LeonardoGolden]

Oh, I see! I'll look into ohneschwanzenegger.

Also, the reason I want to extract the channels as .WADs is because I installed them using cIOS 249 long before it was discontinued, and I thought maybe that was causing problems as to why they just won't boot sometimes.

If it does end up being a hardware issue, I hope I can transfer everything to a new Wii... it'd be a matter of exploiting it with BannerBomb or something and then copying the saves back, right?

 

[person66]

Yup, transferring saves is easy as pie. Also, It shouldn't really matter what the apps were installed using, once they are installed the cIOS you used shouldn't really have any effect at all. Dumping them to a WAD and installing them again shouldn't really change anything.