Hacking Unable to boot into Hekate on a freshly modded Mariko switch with hwfly

[tuxbrain]

I have installed an hwfly on a Mariko switch. When booting without an SD, hwfly first blinks blue and red for about 2 seconds, then turns green for another 2 seconds and then switches off. Spacecraft-NX screen pops up with the NO SD screen. Till here, everything seems good.

However, when trying to load hekate by putting it as payload.bin on an SD card, it boots to a yellow text screen. with the following text:

Failed to mount SD!
Missing LP0 (sleep mode) lib!

Update boot loader folder!

An exception occurred (LR 40014D01):
UNDEF

Press any key....

If you go ahead you get a red text:

Failed to init SD card.
SD card reader is not properly seated!

Now, to be clear:

1. The SD cards have been partitioned with MBR
2. The SD cards have been formatted with FAT32 both on MacOS and on Windows 10
3. Tried two Intenso 8 GB SDs, plus one Samsung Evo Plus 256 GB
4. Checked with a microscope the SD connector on the switch mainboard, all pins are perfect
5. Replaced the SD socket board with another Switch's socket board, no luck

Most issues focus on hardware problems of the SD card (connectors), but if it was an SD card issue, it wouldn't even load the first stage payload.bin isn't it?

Any idea what else could be done to try to have it boot Hekate?

I followed step by step the instructions on rentry.org to create the SD card, but without luck. If there are any updated instructions please let me know.

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[urherenow]

Thanks for bringing this here, but did you close the “bug”report? Sorry I’m about to sleep now, but will check back on this thread after work tomorrow. You should post finder or explorer pics of your sd card contents to include the root, contents of /bootloader /bootloader/payloads and /bootloader/sys.

Worst case, you may need to show pics of your hwfly install including whole board, and close-ups of all of the solder points.

Also, I am so not a fan of “packs” or tutorials, but have you tried Googling “hwfly HATS pack”, if only for grins?

 

[tuxbrain]

Thanks for the tip, just tried shtetix's HATS pack, same result, boot stops at the yellow text screen.

 

[urherenow]

Thanks for the tip, just tried shtetix's HATS pack, same result, boot stops at the yellow text screen.

You likely need to post pics of all of your solder points. Assuming you don’t have a faulty chip, you may have caused a short somewhere, or perhaps mis-wired something. It simply isn’t able to read your sd card at all, it seems.

 

[tuxbrain]

The fact is, if there would be any miswirings related to the SD card, why does the modchip successfully load payload.bin from it? That's what I don't get, it doesn't make sense, it seems to be something related to the actual content of the SD card...

By the way I just swapped hwfly chip as I had another one, just for science... nothing changed.

 

[tuxbrain]

It would be helpful if somebody with an actual Mariko switch and an hwfly sxcore clone taken from aliexpress would point out to what he/she actually did put on the SD card right after installing the modchip. Anybody?

 

[urherenow]

You are NOT, in fact, booting a payload.bin. The only thing that is booting is what's flashed to the chip itself. If you were booting payload.bin AT ALL, you would be greeted with the NYX menu, as it loads independently of anything else on your switch.

Use this (renamed to payload.bin, of course), and see what happens. This requires nothing at all, except for the ability to read/load the payload.bin: https://github.com/shchmue/Lockpick_RCM

Does it work and dump any keys to a file at all? Does it create a file /switch/partialaes.keys ?

Assuming it doesn't work, try a different sd card. Preferably a different brand, and once again, make sure it is MBR and fat32.

 

[tuxbrain]

Nope just tried it, the modchip flashes blue+red for about 5 seconds, then solid green for 2 seconds. Black screen on the switch, no dumped keys on the SD card...

 

[urherenow]

So there you go. Hardware problem, not hekate. You are not reading anything at all from your SD, and I’m not just guessing. If you want help, you NEED to post pics of the whole wiring/soldering job, to include a full, hi-res pic of the whole thing, so we can see that 1) the wiring is indeed correct 2) the solder joints are good, and 3) you don’t have a stray solder ball that splashed somewhere causing a short. I’ve seen “professionals” with the best solder job ever, mess up things by soldering a jumper to the wrong side of a diode…

Solder job being good and sd card being good (but only you can verify your sd card with h2testw), the only other solution is the chip itself, and the only possible fix without getting a replacement, is to re-flash the latest spacecraft-nx to it, but that’s a long shot, considering that you made it to the no sd screen.

EDIT: Well, your sd socket itself could be bad, but that’s not likely at all, given what you’ve told us so far…
EDIT2: What happens when you use fusee.bin as payload.bin? Black screen?

 

[tuxbrain]

I confirm that it was an hardware problem, I installed the modchip on another switch and it is working perfectly.

Unfortunately, I damaged the memory bus under the metal shield while making a bit of force to remove the metal cover that covers the Tegra CPU and the RAM, therefore it seems that it was somehow able to partially work loading some parts of payload.bin but corrupting other parts.

Thanks for the support!