Wii U Stuck on Logo

[ChefVortivask]

Hello everyone,

First time poster here. I decided to make this post since I am having issues with my Wii U. Currently, my Wii U will not boot up to the main menu. It stays stuck on the Wii U logo indefinitely.

There are a few things to note about my console. The console is the black 32 gb model. I believe it was bought during the 2012 holiday season (release) as we were expecting to play Pikmin 3 before it got delayed. The system has never been modded in any fashion. It was not the most heavily played console, and I can't even give a good estimate of when it was last used (at least more than 3 years).

I have already tried doing the UDPIH, however it does not seem to be working. When using the second recovery menu, I get a white screen with some blue lines (see attached image). I believe this is similar to what @fadafwet described in his post. I was able to get the logs from the system, which I have attached to this post. Any idea what the issue may be and how to fix it? Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[SDIO]

Ok it is crashing now because the SD isn't doesn't have a valid mlc on it. Delete the scfm.img and run the mlc setup again.

EDIT: is the card now in the slot or the adapter?

 

[ChefVortivask]

Card is in the adapter. I had to put wafel_setup and the install folder back on the card since I took them off to make sure nothing was interfering previously. I deleted scfm.img and tried patch & boot. The first attempt gave me that -131090 error, but I tried again since I thought it was formatting the card. The second attempt seemed to get stuck in a loop that you can see in the log. I also noticed some errors in it.

 

[SDIO]

Make sure that all the wireless modules are connected correctly

 

[ChefVortivask]

I had a feeling you'd say that since I've seen loops caused by wireless modules on other posts. I inspected all three modules and the only one that looks like it could have been an issue was the module towards the front of the console with no wires (I believe that's the WiFi module for the gamepad). It appeared to popped out a tiny bit from its connector as it was crooked. I reseated it and tried again, but the loop is still happening. I can try reseating the other two modules and their wires if that might help.

 

[ChefVortivask]

I noticed that in the logs for my setup attempts, there was the line Dir /vol/sdcard/wafel_install open failed: FFFCFFE9 Aborting.... I double checked that I spelled the folder correctly on the SD card (not the micro SD card), which I did, and took off some stuff I didn't need at the time (such as SLC.RAW). That didn't solve the issue, so I checked the card using MiniTool Partition Wizard and I noticed four partitions which was odd. I'm guessing maybe trying to make the redNAND led to the partitions? Anyways, I figured maybe the wafel_install folder was on a partition that couldn't be accessed by the Wii U (or maybe minute or the pico in this case?).

I completely cleaned the card by wiping the disk using MiniTool Partition Wizard, flashed boot1.img, leaving me with three partitions. Like before, I combined the two non boot partitions by first converting them to ntfs, combining, and then formatting to fat32, giving me the partition around 1.8 gb. I then placed all the proper files and folders on the card, tried again, but it was getting stuck on MLC open attempt. I then noticed that when minute was booting up, it didn't appear my micro SD card was being detected like it had previously since I didn't see the size come up. I figured who knows what might've happened to the card after all these tests, so I decided to completely clean the card and start from fresh.

I checked the card using h2testw. Everything looked fine so I then wiped the card using MiniTool Partition Wizard, tried setup again and noticed that upon booting up minute, the size of the card showed again. Tried patch & boot which got stuck on MLC open attempt, but this isn't too surprising considering the first attempt formats the card. On my second attempt, I once again noticed that the size of the card was not showing (log attached), and now it gets stuck on MLC open attempt. I'm not sure if the size of the card is supposed to show after the card has been formatted, so any clarification would be helpful.

I'll also note that I did check my wiring and connections using a multimeter, and everything appears to be fine and nothing is shorted. I did delete scfm.img on the micro SD card before cleaning it, but not after since I just made the assumption that everything had been wiped, but I could be wrong. I'm wondering if something is going wrong when the card is being formatted on that first attempt.

 

[SDIO]

The other partitions where indeed redNAND. It uses partitions for each device it redirects. YOu could just have deleted them and grow the FAT32 partition.

But If the SD is only sometimes detected, then there is something flaky with the hardware.

 

[ChefVortivask]

I didn’t even see the 64 kb (or mb?) partition for boot1, so I wasn’t even sure what was what. I played it safe and just started from scratch so I could safely say that wasn’t an issue.

As for the SD not being detected, I’ll do some more tests to see if it randomly gets detected. If it does, then it probably is a bad connection (although at this point I don’t know how, unless it’s the wiring to the card adapter). It just seems like too much of a coincidence that the card got detected right after it had been freshly cleaned and then didn’t show up afterwards.

I do have a question though regarding scfm.img. I’m not sure if has been addressed on this thread what exactly scfm.img is, but regardless, until the mlc titles are installed, can I just delete scfm.img instead of completely wiping it? The wiping took around 2 hours when I did it.

Post automatically merged: Jan 1, 2024

I did some more tests (which just consisted of seeing if the card would be detected), and it looks like issue probably isn't with formatting the card as I had hypothesized. The very first attempt I did shows the name of the card, but not the size. The second attempt showed nothing of interest, so I thought it was possible that maybe there was a flaky connection. I checked every connection again, probing the contact of the SD card adapter to the vias, and just like before, everything looked fine. All resistance values were close to 0 ohms. I also checked for shorts and could not find any. I tried booting into minute again and this time the name and size of the card showed up (I tried patch & boot but it got stuck on MLC open attempt). I tried once again opening into minute and this time a name that appears to be corrupted showed up as well as the size (which was slightly different from the previous attempt. I've attached logs so you can see the results.

Although it could be possible that there is a flaky connection somewhere, the fact that I can't find anything that suggests such a thing leads me to believe there could be something else going on. I'm wondering if the SD card slot could be to blame. Considering that right now I can't get the name or the size of the card to show up when I'm using the slot, it seems there is something wrong with the slot itself. Even though I'm not detecting any shorts, could there still be something going on inside the slot that is causing these results such as two pins barely touching each other?

 

[SDIO]

What do you mean by completely wiping? Deleting scfm.img is to make sure it holds no stalee data. If you mean completely wiping the SD, then sou should be fine by just overwriting the first few MB. But that doesn't seem to be the problem here anyway.

To check if the slot is the problem you soldered the SD adapter, if you see the same problem with the adapter, then it's probably not the slot...

Maybe the SDIO port on the SoC is just broken. If it was shorted that might have damaged a driver there and now it is missing the strength to drive it properly.
You could try adding a 100Kohm pull up on CMD

Post automatically merged: Jan 1, 2024

Or you wait for the SATA Adapter and then use a SATA SSD or HDD in place of the disc drive. That replaces the mlc and doesn't need the mlc to be detected.

 

[ChefVortivask]

I agree the micro SD card doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment.

I understand that the SD card adapter was used to check to see if the SD card slot was a problem, and although I am encountering the same problem, it seems to be working better using the SD card adapter. I do however want to do some more tests with the slot to see if I can get similar results to the adapter as it's possible I've just been getting lucky with the adapter.

As for possibly shorting the SDIO port, any idea on how that could have happened? Could that have involved any of the six main data connections I've been using? Also, I'm unfamiliar with the term "pull up" in this context. It looks like you're referring to a resistor. Would this just be a 100 kohm resistor soldered in series with the CMD line?

 

[SDIO]

pull up means a resistor that pulls the signal towards the high state in that case 3v3. So you would add a 100kOhm resistor between 3V3 and CMD. The spec says there should be one (but I think it should later be disabled when switiching to a higher speed. So that is probably internal to the SoC. So in case that internal pullup got damaged or later when it is in push pull mode, where the pull up is disabled, the pull up could still help if the driver is damaged and has problems pulling up)

 

[ChefVortivask]

Interesting. Would there be any way to test it to see if it might be damaged? I understand that I can replace it with the hard drive, but I would prefer to keep the disc drive.

 

[SDIO]

If you had an oscilloscope, you could look at the waveform. Else I wouldn't know how to check that.

 

[ChefVortivask]

I personally don’t have one, but I know some people who may be able to help me.

Post automatically merged: Jan 2, 2024

I just got a quite interesting result. I tried out the card slot and on my first attempt, the card name and size came up, so it seems the slot really isn't the issue. I tried patch & boot, but no luck. On my second attempt, neither the name nor size came up, so I decided to unplug the power (after a proper shutoff of course), wait a few minutes, and then try again. The card name and size showed up once again, and this time when I tried patch & boot, it got far further than it had before. I think it was actually able to access the card this time, but there were errors, notably it says an error occurred in scfm, so it cannot access. I assume this could possibly mean that there is already an scfm on the card that is interfering? Since it got so far this time, does this mean the SDIO port could be fine and there's just a flaky connection somewhere, thus why my results seem to be random?

I've attached the log, though unfortunately it got so long that I wasn't able to capture everything. I would guess though that since it started going through the titles that it was able to access the wafel_install folder this time.

 

[SDIO]

Could also be that it works just a little better when it is cold.
Also it's possible that something in the controller crashes so hard because of the errors that the normal reset isn't working for it or something like that. Still looks like a hardware problem to me.
Also scfm.img is stored on the slc

 

[ChefVortivask]

I was thinking something similar to the cold being better since my best results seem to be the first ones after the console has sat around a bit. I’m wondering though what you mean by the controller crashing and the normal reset not working. I’m not sure if it’s easy to explain or not since now we’re moving into more technical details regarding the hardware.

 

[SDIO]

Maybe the eMMC wasn't even the problem in the first place, but the host controller in the soc began to fail and that caused the errors. But then it would be strange that your Wii U always failed at the same point on the eMMC.

 

[ChefVortivask]

What do you mean by the same point? You might also be onto something with the host controller failing since I really can’t think of when or what kind of short would’ve caused this issue. I don’t know if a short between any of the data lines (including CLK and CMD) would’ve caused such a problem. I assume that if 3V3 was shorted to any of those lines, damage would be very obvious. Also, I don’t think 3V3 was ever shorted to anything except when I was checking the voltage a couple months back. The probe I had on the 3V3 pin accidentally touched the metal shielding of the slot causing small sparks, but that’s just a short between 3V3 and GND, so I don’t see how that could cause damage.

 

[SDIO]

The signal level is also 3V3, so it shouldn't be too catastrophic if the 3V3 are applied for a short time, but it's far from ideal if the host is trying to drive the signal low while 3V3 is applied or vice versa.

The scfm error was also caused by the mlc erroring out.

Just to make sure I attached a minute version, which doesn't init the mlc, in case that causes any problems. So the mlc gets only touched by IOSU.

 

[ChefVortivask]

I tried that version of minute that doesn't init the mlc, and it looks like everything before the menu shows up is fine (taking into account that nothing regarding the mlc shows up, as is expected). However, when I try patch & boot, it gets stuck on MLC open attempt. I've tried several times and have waited a few minutes between a couple attempts in case it was an issue related to temperature, but nothing changed.

 

[SDIO]

so it must be some hardware fault.
You can try adding a pull up other than that I don't have any more ideas, without oscilloscope traces.