Hacking SD card removed while on, all homebrew gone from Home menu

[MustaphaMond]

At some point my girlfriend removed the SD card while her old 3ds was turned on (twice in a row) and all the homebrew apps disappeared from the home menu, including FBI. I delved into all the relevant threads I could find here and elsewhere, but nothing seems to be exactly what I'm seeing. Also, I have a tentative understanding on CFW/3ds modding, and I was not able to link any of the guides I wanted for better context due to my account being new, so please bare with me.

Current state of device/ SD card:

• Missing "0:/3ds/titles"
• Missing "Nintendo 3DS/(id0)/(id1)/dbs"
• In System Settings > Data Management > Nintendo 3DS > Software, no titles show up nor is there a popup to fix anything
• Using Rosalina to launch Homebrew launcher and then FBI (I had to install fbi.3dsx for this), no titles show up other than normal system apps and tons of red ones with random characters
• Attempting to launch one of those red games through FBI throws a "prefetch abort (svcBreak)" error
• G9 opens normally, shows SYSNAND CTRNAND
• A backup was made when I originally followed the 3ds modding guide, but before I installed the games

Things I have tried:

• Made 2 copies of the SD card and put one on a a new one tested with h2testw and started working with the new SD card
• Attempted reinstalling fbi.cia with fbi, gave a "Cert signature or hash checked failed" error
• Tried running faketik but got a "External Title Database is not available" error.
• Fix CMACs for drive & edit moveable.sed
• Deleting all old games out of the CIA folder (I still have the backup)
• Checked through many guides for very similar problems but ended up not working or not being applicable (as many as I could find listed below)

I was able to use to use the Rosalina/Homebrew launcher to open FBI, install a game cia, and it shows up on the home menu and launches normally, but not to reinstall FBI. I feel like I'm missing something here... While I could go through and just reinstall all the games, I would like the system to be restored to exactly how it was before they disappeared. It feels like a bandaid rather than an actual fix. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

[splaca]

Hello,

I might not be of much help because I'm not very knowledgeable, but I'll at least try to keep the ball rolling for now.

1. When you say you made 2 copies of the SD, do you mean you used the backup you have (from before installing the games)? Or did you try to copy the contents of your SD as-is? If it's the latter option, I'm afraid that the files that were lost or corrupted would make everything more flaky;
2. What titles does gm9 find? If you didn't check, enter "Title management" after pressing the Home button on gm9. This should show installed 3DS titles, including homebrew installed as menu entries;
3. If you want to reinstall FBI, you could try doing that from gm9 -- it's a faster method for installing CIAs anyway. (For stuff you already have CIAs for I'd use gm9, and to source other apps I'd just use Universal Updater once installed. But this is not a priority to solving your problem.)

I honestly don't know if titles.db can be reconstructed in any way besides reinstalling the software, which I know is not ideal. Maybe custom-install-finalize from Custom Install could do something like that? You could try asking for help in the specific thread.
If you're worried about save files (though you don't sound like you are), you could see if Checkpoint finds the game saves, and you could back them up to recover after reinstalling.

Personally, I'd probably start from the clean backup and reinstall the software. I know it's a bummer though, and hopefully there's some way to recover from this.

 

[anotherthing]

When you say you made 2 copies of the SD, do you mean you used the backup you have (from before installing the games)? Or did you try to copy the contents of your SD as-is? If it's the latter option, I'm afraid that the files that were lost or corrupted would make everything more flaky;

I'd agree with this. Ejecting a card while it's in use is fairly bad for the data on the card. Even if Windows copies it and doesn't report an error, that doesn't mean that data isn't garbage at this point. Unless you're restoring the card from a back up you made before the card was removed twice while the power is on, there's really no way to make sure that what's on the new card isn't corrupted.

If you have the original card, unaltered with the data still on there complete with the problems, you could try Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier. It does some error checking and recovery, so it should be a better launchboard than just copying it with Windows.