Category: repair

Posted on

the two more wii u systems have arrived.

i’ll start with some context as per usual. so one night i was on ebay just searching for broken wii u systems cause i thought it’d be fun to fix another one. i find a pair of broken systems for ~£33 and as i explained in the previous post the seller claimed that one had error 160-0103 and the other they had no clue. so i decide to buy them.

fast forward to the following monday, they’re here. and in quite bad condition too. not dirty or dusty thankfully, just a load of scratches which i suppose isn’t unusual for a wii u now that i’m thinking about it. i then take them upstairs and plug one of them in. it’s the error 160 one! using udpih to boot the unofficial wii u recovery menu shown me that it was on firmware version 5.5.2 (e). i then use said recovery menu to dump the system’s error logs and have a look through them. media error. hynix. unsurprising. now that i know what’s going on though, i download MLCRestorerDownloader and use it to download the MLC titles (which for the most part is all the software on the wii u that you as a user interact with) onto the sd card. i then use udpih to launch into the isfshax installer and install it to the system. now that’s on there i use the minute menu to wipe the system’s MLC and scfm.img (which i now kinda regret not doing after i had dumped the MLC but oh well). then the new MLC titles go on there and the problem seems to be fixed. for now. a kinda funny side effect of doing it this way is that the system’s MLC has effectively been updated while its SLC is still on 5.5.2, meaning it’s using 5.5.2’s iosu to boot the 5.5.5 MLC titles. doing this doesn’t seem to cause any issues at all and it’s easy enough to just update the system now that i’m in but despite that it still made me laugh a little when i first saw it. a less funny side effect of doing this is that because i’m not using a rednand this error could come back at any point due to me having just reinstalled the MLC titles onto a failing MLC. that won’t be an issue though now that isfshax is on the system because i can just use that to either drag the MLC through the pits of hell one last time or make a rednand.

now this second one’s a bit of a funny one. i connect it up to my switch to run udpih and boot it. it does fail to display anything so i download the dc_init variant of the recovery menu and try it. it works. i then install isfshax and boot with nothing but the plugins required to boot now that it has isfshax installed. it’s perfectly fine. no issues whatsoever. i have no clue either. all i know is that it’s actually my main wii u system now, turns out this one doesn’t have a hynix nand. it’s a toshiba! as far as i’m aware toshibas seem to be the most reliable of the three MLC manufacturers. unfortunately i can’t move my NNIDs over to this new system as that requires you contact nintendo’s support and ask them to unlink the NNIDs and looking through their support pages i can’t tell if they offer this service anymore. but that’s not much an issue when you can make backups of your digital games i suppose.

man i love homebrew.

Posted on

i have 2 more wii u systems on the way.

they’re both broken. one’s showing my personal favourite wii u error (160-0103), the other they have absolutely no clue what’s going on with it. i will be making a full blog post about them. also you ever seen how many of those boxed white 32gb japanese splatoon wii u systems there are online? i want one.

you’re the one with the wii u problem. not me.

Posted on

so i bought a broken wii u

(an unpublished post from May 2024)

a couple days ago, i was on ebay looking at Wii U systems. i find this one for just under £17 that claims to be broken. specifically, it’s showing the error code 160-0103. as of today, this can be a really easy error code to fix thanks to the fact that udpih exists, so i decide to buy it. fast-forward to today, and it’s here. i connect it to power and my capture card, boot up OBS so i have a display, and…

…it boots normally to the Wii U menu. there are 2 users on it, neither are linked to an NNID and there’s no parental control lock. i check the system version. it’s on 5.5.4 (E). i then put in my mario kart 8 disc to see if it will play a game, it plays fine. next, i connect it to the internet to prepare for exploiting it. i go back to the wii u menu. turns out the past owner had automatic updates enabled. the update completes and the system reboots. i go to the web browser after preparing my SD card, send it to wiiuexploit.xyz and run the exploit. it’s failed to mount the sd card. i reboot and open mii maker to try exporting a mii, just to double check. yeah it’s not mounted.

so i end up thinking the SD card slot is gone, because all the buttons and slots on the front panel feel looser than my main system and other SD card adapters don’t work. i try reformatting the SD card anyway just in case, thankfully it worked this time. i exploit it again, now the NAND (minus the MLC) is dumped and I have isfshax on the thing. i dump the logs. there seems to be nothing there until i get to log number 11 of 13. that one shows a media error. there’s the issue, the MLC is probably on its way out. it’s a Hynix so i’m not surprised.

i now prepare the SD card for a redNAND setup. resizing goes fine, now i need to download the MLC titles. i decide to try something different this time and download the Japanese MLC titles and attempt a region switch. i install them on the redNAND and it boots to the first-time setup after a ~5 minute install.