Hacking Special N3ds 11.0 downgrading case

[Link0]

I have a bit of an interesting N3ds on my hands, and in order to downgrade it properly i think i need some confirmation on a couple of details involved.

Lets start with why this case is slightly special, and not commonly discussed. This N3ds used to be hacked with MenuHAX with an unlinked emuNAND (The emuNAND being the formatted one). I say used to, as i upgraded my sysNAND to 11.0 by accident. Menuhax users take note, it can happen to the best of us. In any case, this has a number of implications, chief among them that i have a backup of the 9.2 SysNAND that was originally made with Decrypt9. It also means i have 3 downgrade paths, and I'm wondering which would be ideal.

First, i could restore my 9.2 nand backup via dgTools. This would probably be the easiest and possibly safest option. However, i don't know how reliable it is or if it's even a valid option in this case. Does anyone have any experience with it?

The other two options involve using SysUpdater to downgrade as per usual. But my concern is that if it softbricks, I'd be back on 11.2. Which leads me to question two. Would dsiwarehax still be installed and usable in this case? If so, there's no real risk in going down this path as I'd have infinite retries.

The third option would be to format using Tinyformat beforehand in order to nullify the softbrick risk. However, given that it has an unlinked emuNAND, I'd need to format it twice, right? similar to the 2.10 downgrade. As it had something to do with a unique identifier being randomized to the same number.
I've forgotten the exact reason, and it's been kind of difficult to dig it back up.

Does anyone have any insights regarding this?

 

[_Shebang]

I have a bit of an interesting N3ds on my hands, and in order to downgrade it properly i think i need some confirmation on a couple of details involved.

Lets start with why this case is slightly special, and not commonly discussed. This N3ds used to be hacked with MenuHAX with an unlinked emuNAND (The emuNAND being the formatted one). I say used to, as i upgraded my sysNAND to 11.0 by accident. Menuhax users take note, it can happen to the best of us. In any case, this has a number of implications, chief among them that i have a backup of the 9.2 SysNAND that was originally made with Decrypt9. It also means i have 3 downgrade paths, and I'm wondering which would be ideal.

First, i could restore my 9.2 nand backup via dgTools. This would probably be the easiest and possibly safest option. However, i don't know how reliable it is or if it's even a valid option in this case. Does anyone have any experience with it?

The other two options involve using SysUpdater to downgrade as per usual. But my concern is that if it softbricks, I'd be back on 11.2. Which leads me to question two. Would dsiwarehax still be installed and usable in this case? If so, there's no real risk in going down this path as I'd have infinite retries.

The third option would be to format using Tinyformat beforehand in order to nullify the softbrick risk. However, given that it has an unlinked emuNAND, I'd need to format it twice, right? similar to the 2.10 downgrade. As it had something to do with a unique identifier being randomized to the same number.
I've forgotten the exact reason, and it's been kind of difficult to dig it back up.

Does anyone have any insights regarding this?

I can't speak to concern #3, but for the other two:

1. If you can get dgTools working, restoring your NAND backup should probably be fine.
2. DSiWarehax is still installed in the case of a softbrick that requires recovery mode & updating to 11.2, so yes you can infinitely retry. However, if you softbrick the first time, you will probably have to end up using TinyFormat anyways. It seems that most people who softbricked needed to format to get out of the softbrick loop.

 

[mikey420]

Yes restoring via an installed dsiwarehax is the option to use if you have a working dsi title with hax installed.

 

[Link0]

Right, cheers for the input. I'll try and restore the nand when OoThax stops crashing. It's supposed to be crazy unstable on 11.0 right?

 

[mikey420]

Oothax won't help for restoring a band on 11.0. You need to bassically do a dsiware downgrade but can skip using the downgraded as you already have a downgraded band to flash in the dsiwarehax

 

[Link0]

I...am aware of this. I'll still need to boot waithax, which requires a homebrew entrypoint like OoT3DS

 

[jupitersj]

Right, cheers for the input. I'll try and restore the nand when OoThax stops crashing. It's supposed to be crazy unstable on 11.0 right?

Oothax was always very picky for me on 11+ on o3dsxl and n3dsxl, always crashed to home menu if I touched the touchscreen or used ocarina/item. It only ever worked for me if I went to the sign next to Link's bed and read it using the A button.

 

[Link0]

Okay lets wrap this up for future readers.

I could not get OoTHax to work for the life of me, despite your helpful comment, and i eventually ran out of patience with it.
Instead, i discovered that i could make a backup of my DSiWare title and copy it to my o3ds. So i patched the save there, made a new backup and copied it back to the N3ds.
I could do this because i have another very special case here. My O3ds's linked emunand was transferred to my n3ds at some point, with the DSiWare on it already. This means they share a movable.sed, AND have the ticket in their ticket.db.

I don't think anyone has realized this trick, but this allows you to move DSiWares back and forth. It makes complete sense that this is possible, but I've never seen it documented.

As the save is included within the rom and it's backup, that got transferred along as i had hoped and let me boot dgTool. I restored the Nand successfully with it, and my N3ds is happily back on 9.2.
I've learned my lesson now though, and I'll move toward an A9LH setup shortly.