Gaming So I bricked my DSi... Will a hardmod bring it back to life?

[tiduscrying]

Hey all. I am sure you are all well aware of the DSiWarehax that was leaked over the past week (if you aren't, don't go looking for it, it's a bad idea). Well, I was a fool and messed around with it. Long story short, I bricked my system and now only boot to a bottom white screen and a top black screen with the text, "Error: 00000FEFE" at the top.

Long story kept long, I successfully utilized the leak exploit and booted into fwTool. I dumped my NAND and CID and all of that jazz (luckily I still have all the backups) and then proceeded to downgrade the cart whitelist, system settings and loader. Modifying and re-injecting the NAND back onto the system actually worked fine the first time around. But then... I decided that I wanted to go further and push my luck a little more by injecting another entrypoint into the NAND so I wouldn't have to rely on the somewhat-hard-to-boot leaked exploit. I downloaded and dumped Fieldrunners on one of my 3DSes and followed the numerous tutorials available on injecting illegitimate titles into a NAND, but there were a lot of steps and somewhere I made a mistake. Not realizing this until the damage was done, I put the NAND back on my SD card, booted back into fwTool and reflashed, hence causing the brick. It is probably worth mentioning that I flashed a modified version of the NAND over another modified version of the NAND. I took my image that I made with the downgraded system titles on it and just injected the other stuff into that instead of making another backup and using that.

Now I know that I am SOL for any software fixes. There is no such thing as GodMode9 or B9S for the DSi, so there is no way for me to boot into fwTool and reflash the healthy modified NAND and revive the system. So I have invested in a soldering iron (which was a coincidence, really. I got one to make some VITA2SD adapters and for some other projects) and I took apart my system so I could attempt a hardmod. I have the images of what readouts need to be soldered to the SD card adapter (which is the method I am using, anyways), but I was curious if anyone has any experience hardmodding their system in a similar fashion.

What I believe I should be able to do is write my clean NAND backup to the system via the hardmod, but I wanted to check here first before doing anything hastier than I've already done. I haven't physically done the hardmod yet, just because I am hesitant of how small the solder points are (I am extremely new to soldering; like this would essentially be my first time) and because I was looking to see if there was any more visual info or documentation that I need to see first.

If anyone has any experience or advice before I take the plunge and try to revive my system, please let me know! I don't have much to lose now; I mean the system was completely empty so I am not at risk of missing any games. I did want to just revive it so I can install HiyaCFW and utilize RocketLauncher when they are released, even if it is largely useless for me. It is still really cool though, and the prospect of a full DSi CFW is really exciting, even if I only used the system to play games off an R4!

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I will also try to photograph/document the procedure if successful for potential dabblers like me. I also want this to stand as a good example of "learning by other people's mistakes" since I messed with something that wasn't publicly available and took steps that were complex just so I could be one of the first ones to do it. Don't be like me. Be patient...

 

[reprep]

you can write it back via hardmod. Also you can test your dump by no$gba

 

[jerbear64]

Reminder: this is a risk you take when using leaked exploits that come bundled with power user tools. If an exploit isn't released, that's because it isn't ready.

On that note, 0000FEFE means one of two things- corrupt NVRAM (which would be quite the coincidence) or a bootsector integrity error. Odds are you didn't re-encrypt the NAND properly, or the NAND you flashed was corrupt. In that case, a hardmod will be able to bring it back to life.

fwtool is not for the faint of heart, and it doesn't have any safety checks or anything of the sort because it's not intended for end users. Hell, the readme tells you not to use it.

Also as reprep mentioned, testing your modified NAND image in no$gba really isn't a bad idea at all- it's what I do every time before flashing a NAND image, and it has saved me from bricks in the past.

 

[DinohScene]

Yep, you can restore it with a hardmod as said by reprep.

Seems you probably forgot to encrypt your NAND again.
If you wouldn't encrypt your tickets then the apps would just refuse to boot.

Edit: ninja'd

 

[tiduscrying]

Thank you all for the responses! I'll be sure to keep this thread updated. The hard mod shouldn't be too difficult from what I've seen, so I'll likely be attempting it tonight.

And I very much learned my lesson on leaked things. I usually don't touch leaks with a ten foot pole, but for whatever reason I stupidly decided to mess with this one. Not a mistake I am going to make twice, that's for sure.

 

[DinohScene]

Well, once you got the hardmod, there's no reason to not touch leaked things or foolishly play with the NAND.

The exploit is likely to be fine.
You probably just forgot to reencrypt your NAND again or FWTool spazzed out and didn't wrote your NAND back properly (which I doubt)

Good luck with it!

 

[GhostLatte]

Let me know how the hardmodding goes because I need have my DSi hardmodded since I bricked it!

 

[CatmanFan]

You shouldn't even have installed Fieldrunners into your DSi through NAND modifying anyway.

 

[GhostLatte]

You shouldn't even have installed Fieldrunners into your DSi through NAND modifying anyway.

What's wrong with it?

 

[CatmanFan]

What's wrong with it?

To quote @tiduscrying: "I wanted to go further and push my luck a little more by injecting another entrypoint into the NAND so I wouldn't have to rely on the somewhat-hard-to-boot leaked exploit."
ONLY if you have another exploitable DSiWare installed AFAIK.

 

[tiduscrying]

Well, I guess I should update...

Trying the hardmod myself was probably not the way to go. I should have seen if there were other hardmodders around who would have been willing to do the task for me, but instead I tried it on my own and it didn't really end well. My soldering gun has some very fine tips, sure, but that doesn't help much when you have shaky hands and can't see well. Even with helping hands and magnifying glasses, I couldn't really focus on the solder points as well as I wanted to. Near the end of my attempts, I could barely get the wire I was trying to solder to one of the destined ports to stick to the contact. I might have also been using too high of a temperature (I tried 250 degrees Celsius) so I don't really know, but from the looks of my... handiwork, I may have cooked some vital components. I put the system back together just to see if I really did bork it and I can't really confirm or deny much of anything. When I press the power button, the orange charging LED blinks almost endlessly until I press the power button once more. There is likely some deeper reason to this, but at this point I feel more like giving up than anything else. Sending it to someone to have them do a proper hardmod could end up costing just as much as buying another DSi (or even a DSi XL) used and just proceeding a lot more cautiously it.

My friends keep reminding me that I really don't need DSiwarehax anyways since I have multiple 3DSes to mess around with, but the nostalgia and novelty of having CFW on the DSi is quite appealing to me. Ultimately, I think I will have to shelve any attempts at fixing it and messing around with DSi's altogether until I either have a lot more time and money or am way better at soldering.

 

[driverdis]

You forgot to re-encrypt the NAND. The leaked exploit works fine and allowed me to dump the NAND, downgrade, install Suduku+hax save, then flashed it back just fine.

I have flashed it a couple more times with the sudukuhax entry point to add the fieldrunners game+exploit and four swords (no hack save, just game).

The only thing wrong with the leaked exploit right now is the fact that it was leaked without permission. I have found nothing about it actually being dangerous to use or it causing bricks. All the bricks were caused by not encrypting the NAND or having a bad dump in the first place.

 

[Koksi__]

I hardmodded my DSi XL, get my CID, Console ID, injected Sudoku, but every time i got a green screen freeze.
So i mounted my NAND_DEC and deleted the public.sav and flashed the NAND back, but i think it was the decrypted NAND and i got the "0000FEFE" Error every time i start my DSi XL.
I flashed back the original NAND, but it doesnt help.
I can write and read the NAND, the dump is also working with nogba, but not with my DSi
DSiBrew: Boot sector integrity error (Sector 0x200 not valid), or error in NVRAM contents.
What can i do?
Is my DSi completely bricked?

 

[driverdis]

I hardmodded my DSi XL, get my CID, Console ID, injected Sudoku, but every time i got a green screen freeze.
So i mounted my NAND_DEC and deleted the public.sav and flashed the NAND back, but i think it was the decrypted NAND and i got the "0000FEFE" Error every time i start my DSi XL.
I flashed back the original NAND, but it doesnt help.
I can write and read the NAND, the dump is also working with nogba, but not with my DSi
DSiBrew: Boot sector integrity error (Sector 0x200 not valid), or error in NVRAM contents.
What can i do?
Is my DSi completely bricked?

Make sure to remove the no$gba header from the decrypted NAND dump, encrypt it, then flash the NAND.

 

[Koksi__]

I have 4 NAND dumps from the completly original Console.
I tried one of these NANDs, but there is always the same error
So there is no Header on these NANDs, because they are clean