Hacking Question What is the SMALLEST SXOS EmuNAND setup?

[mikefor20]

Hello Everybody!
I want to setup a minimal EmuNAND so I can run my USB drive in SXOS. I am on Atmosphere primarily these days but I miss my USB loading. I am wondering if there is a way to reduce the size of the EnuNAND? I want it as small as possible. Just enough to play all SXOS compatible games (11.x and prior) and save files?. That way I can get USB loading going again when I want to and have the smallest impact on my SD.

Does the entire EmuNAND need to be there? I realize there will be updates and stuff to fill the EmuNAND space but I wanted to just have Super XCI with updates and a small foot print EmuNAND with JUST the OS. Can we cut out the unnecessary stuff and get the EmuNAND size down?

Having a SMALL file based EmuNAND sitting there on my SD and FastCFW seems like a nice way to access SXOS USB loading quickly and if we can make the EmuNAND small it could be the best route to continuing to utilize the only real killer feature SXOS has.

Maybe is better to get a new SD and have a SXOS only setup....

 

[Inaki]

Hello Everybody!
I want to setup a minimal EmuNAND so I can run my USB drive in SXOS. I am on Atmosphere primarily these days but I miss my USB loading. I am wondering if there is a way to reduce the size of the EnuNAND? I want it as small as possible. Just enough to play all SXOS compatible games (11.x and prior) and save files?. That way I can get USB loading going again when I want to and have the smallest impact on my SD.

Does the entire EmuNAND need to be there? I realize there will be updates and stuff to fill the EmuNAND space but I wanted to just have Super XCI with updates and a small foot print EmuNAND with JUST the OS. Can we cut out the unnecessary stuff and get the EmuNAND size down?

Having a SMALL file based EmuNAND sitting there on my SD and FastCFW seems like a nice way to access SXOS USB loading quickly and if we can make the EmuNAND small it could be the best route to continuing to utilize the only real killer feature SXOS has.

Maybe is better to get a new SD and have a SXOS only setup....

Smallest is 4GB, but that would be non practicable. I use 8GB emunands most of the times/switches ( yes, I have a few ). And then I mount XCI files, if you are going to install games from nsps or xcis,... maybe 16GB or something in between is a clever size.

 

[mikefor20]

Smallest is 4GB, but that would be non practicable. I use 8GB emunands most of the times/switches ( yes, I have a few ). And then I mount XCI files, if you are going to install games from nsps or xcis,... maybe 16GB or something in between is a clever size.

Nice, how did you reduce the EmuNAND?

 

[Inaki]

Nice, how did you reduce the EmuNAND?

It depends: are you going to migrate your current emunand + data partition to a resized layout ? are you starting anew ? are you using SXOS ? or hekate+atmosphere ?

If using hekate+atmosphere and starting anew or not minding to lose current status:

- enter hekate, go to tools, partition SD card, use emuMMC size slider to choose a given size, then next and then accept and so on. If you have data files below 1GB in size it will preserve them and restore them after partitioning.
- close and go to home, then emuMMC, then create emuMMC.
- choose SD Partiton option and accept.
- if the SD partition is smaller than what a sysnand is, 29GB, it will ask you to do a sept only boot to obtain your biskey dump, this is necessary to manipulate your sysnand on the fly.
- so after the sept boot is done and biskey obtained, you will be led to hekate boot menu again, you need to repeat the latest step, home>emuMMC>create emuMMC>SD partition; but this time, since it has a biskey dump, it will get your sysnand contents, decrypt+modify to fit new size+encrypt and write to the smaller emuMMC partition, all on the fly. It will also edit emuMMC\emummc.ini accordingly. Note that, in this case, the emuMMC partition is created at the ending of physical space and the sector=0x... clause on the emummc.ini file will have a high value, as opposed to the typical 0x2 for SXOS style emunands ( which are still compatible with atmosphere, but yeah, you get the point ).

Otherwise, the long way:

- import the keyset from an updated prod.keys of your switch ( obtained with LockPick_RCM payload, launched from hekate )
- insert the microSD on the PC
- do a dump of your current emunand ( I think you don't need this per se, you can do the resizing from the emunand to a file directly )
- save data partition files to some safe place
- use resize emunand tool in NxNandManager and created the resized emunand to a file
- use emunad creation tool in NxNandManager and select the file you created in previous step. This will format the microSD to fit the emunand in the beginning of the microSD and then create a fat32 partition after it.
- close NxNandManager
- format the created fat32 partition. NOTE: this shouldn't be necessary, but most of the times it is, because the created fat32 partition is garbled... also, I recommend Minitool Partition Wizard, and format the fat32 partition with a cluster size of 32KB.
- if you are using SXOS you may need to use EmuTool to activate the SXOS hidden partition ( I don't remember if that's the case ). If you are using atmosphere, when you restore the data partition files, remember to edit emuMMC\emummc.ini and change sextor=0x... to sector 0x2 ( this is so because NxNandManager will create an SXOS style emunand, that is, emunand data starting at sector 2, still compatible with atmosphere, but it needs to be pointed to in this sector=0x clause, so yeah, change it to 0x2 ).

NOTE: I may be missing some point or nuance here, just vomitted this out of my mind in a few minutes. Please read and understand stuff, I am giving this as courtesy so that you at least get a general idea... good luck !

 

[mikefor20]

my Current setup is Sxos EmuNAND on 11.0. I have a new SD so I would like to eventually have Atmosphere running on current FW with EmuNAND and a Second EmuNAND for SX USB loading. I suppose I want to take my current SX OS EmuNAND and shrink it. It is on 11.x and works... I may put multiple partitions or move SXOS to file based EmuNAND. I am not sure yet

 

[Inaki]

my Current setup is Sxos EmuNAND on 11.0. I have a new SD so I would like to eventually have Atmosphere running on current FW with EmuNAND and a Second EmuNAND for SX USB loading. I suppose I want to take my current SX OS EmuNAND and shrink it. It is on 11.x and works... I may put multiple partitions or move SXOS to file based EmuNAND. I am not sure yet

Have a look at this and a few following posts, EmuTool may have some problems but you just need to understand the steps and make them with other tools:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/quickes...os-style-microsd-emunand.586474/#post-9443286

EDIT: https://gbatemp.net/threads/quickes...os-style-microsd-emunand.586474/#post-9445076