Wii U with solid red light

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Hello peoples,

I'm posting this thread looking for some help fixing a retail Wii U I bought while on holiday in Japan.

Some information about the Wii U in its current state, at the moment trying to power it achieves nothing, I'm only given a solid red light.

On initial press of the power button, I've confirmed two things for certain:

• I can see the it pull approx ~0.5A of power as if it was trying to power up
• I can hear the fan spin up.
• Disk does not spin up (not 100% on this, and console is in pieces at the moment)

I decided to try use the Paid The Beak exploit to try and get ISFSHax installed and hopefully boot into the Wii U.

Long story short, I managed to get ISFSHax installed on the console with problems.

More specifically I managed to install ISFSHax but immediately things seemed a bit wrong, after the installation of ISFSHax completed, I hit the option to restart the console and while the screen went blank the console never actually turned off (confirmed via a constant ~15w of power draw and solid purple light on console).

Upon reboot, without use of Paid The Beak, the console returns to its original state of not being able to boot and only showing a solid red light. Using the Paid The Beak exploit again gets me back into the minute menu, where trying to install again reports that its already installed. So I decided to make backups of the SLC, SLCCMPT, OTP, and SEEPROM.

Trying to boot from SLC or any variety of it halts at the IOS GO GO GO log line and looking at the console light shows a solid purple light and even after an hour doesn't boot. This is the same regardles of whether I patch the slc or sd. I've only managed to get a flashing blue light by trying to re-install the IOSU, and using the boot ios_orig.img option, though this just stays on the flashing blue light for 3+ hours until I ultimately power it off manually.

I've tried various different solutions to other problems such as setting up rednand and or re-installing IOSU, although I would not be surprised if I didn't do these properly and so contributed to my inability to make progress. I'm happy to re-attempt these if others believe there is some chance in retrying them. Additionally In my attempts I've deleted the consoles MLC and SCFM, which as far as I know will just mean save data or similar is lost which is no problem to me.

I've put my SLC.RAW dump via nandBinCheck and it produced the following logs

PS D:\Downloads\NAND Recovery\nandtools> .\nandBinCheck.exe ..\WIIU_BKP\SLC.RAW
** nandBinCheck : Wii nand info tool **
   from giantpune
   built: Mar 24 2017 23:49:06
NAND Type: SLC (WiiU)
checking boot1...
Blocks0to1::CheckBoot1 -> Boot0 block 0 and block 1 not identical!
Boot1 check failed!
checking for lost clusters...
total used clusters 3033 of 0x8000
found 0 lost clusters
UNK ( 0xffff ) 0 ()
free            48bd
verifying ecc...
1 out of 900800 pages had incorrect ecc.
they were spread through 1 clusters in 1 blocks:
 (0)
0 of those clusters are non-special (they belong to the fs)
verifying hmac...
verifying hmac for 487 files
hmac bad (1)
"scfm.img" is 8004000 bytes ( 2001 ) clusters

00000000  ff000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................
00000010  00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................
00000020  00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................
00000030  00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................

00000000  ff000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................
00000010  00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................
00000020  00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  ................
00000030  00000000 00000000 a001a001 680f9700  ............h...

00000000  69853343 02199773 e6120cb6 c2126e28  i.3C...s......n(
00000010  552d2b83                             U-+.
bad HMAC for "/scfm.img"
1 files had bad HMAC data
checking HMAC for superclusters...
0 superClusters had bad HMAC data
PS D:\Downloads\NAND Recovery\nandtools>

And as far I understand there a two copies of the boot1 instructions in the SLC and that they're out of sync, and I don't know nearly enough to determine if this is whats causing my other issues with ISFSHax as well as my inability to boot the console.

I've managed to pull the latest log from the SLC dump as well as some config files. The nandBinCheck result leads me to believe the root problem is my Boot1? and from the Ultimate Wii U Troubleshooting Guide Boot1 corruption instructions are not yet available.

My next steps were going to be to try setup a defuse as I already have all the stuff (was originally planning on doing the defuse mod chip but PTB came out before I got to it) but I want to exhaust my other avenues first.

If anyone here familiar with this could offer some insight as to next steps or etc. I'm happy to provide whatever additional information is required, any help would be seriously appreciated!

 

[BICKnowledge]

Yep, on restoring boot1 it says that they are already in sync.

 

[BICKnowledge]

Beyond syncing the seeprom with the boot1 version, is there anything else to check or does it seem like defuse is the way to go for more detailed logs?

 

[BICKnowledge]

Ok I've made some progress, I managed to get console to get to the Wii U screen now, turns out I needed to have the disc drive plugged in.

So state of the console is now:

Without Pico plugged in and without SD card, the console now boots into ISFSHax properly.

Running option 3 patch SD and boot IOS, had a flashing blue light originally, but after 10 minutes went solid. But it just stayed solid for over 30 minutes after which is rebooted the console. Now options 3 takes me to the Wii U screen, but the console automatically powers down. Sometime it will make it to the pair gamepad screen but will again power off. Heat sink is cool to the touch and on reboot stays on in ISFSHax menu just fine?
so hunch is possibly some voltage drop over the power supply cable and once loading into the IOS its sags too much and powers off?

I re-dumped the system crash logs but the log pointer is still at 287 (87) just like before. Only difference now is displaying the crashlog in ISFSHax show the following:

I've attached the Wafel install logs, nothing looked out of the ordinary to me?

Post automatically merged: Nov 8, 2025

Update after fixing up my botched power cable to the console, I was able to boot into the Wii U and setup the console. Seems like my problem was just with my power cable causing too much voltage drop and resulting in the console to power down during higher current draws.

But otherwise the console is booting now, so I'll re-install the MLC with the EU titles so I can use this thing in English and afterwards I'll close this thing up, hopefully for good!

@SDIO thanks for the help! it was very much appreciated!