Wii System Menu bricks itself over time. What is going on and what can I do to fix it?

[clandestine]

I've been having weird issues with my SD card over the past few months and no matter what I do I can't resolve it. Over time my Wii actually will NOT BOOT WITH THE SD CARD INSERTED and I need to restore my nand backup with bootmii to get things working normally.

It started when I revisted my Wii after years of not touching it. I installed some new WiiWare games on my SD card (I have parched ios80 sysmenu4.3u that I use to load them off of), updated priiloader, and updated some software on my Wii. Some general spring cleaning!

But I noticed that the SD card menu sometimes would freeze if I hit the home menu, and also some channels show up as a Question Mark and I'd get a message saying that "This channel cannot be launched on this Wii" despite region free enabled in priiloader and ios80 being parched (all my wads are in region anyhow). This error was sporadic. Sometimes if I reloaded the menu every game would display and launch correctly on SD. Other times many would be question marks. This wasn't the biggest deal as i could move to an emunand setup. Just annoying, but I couldn't find anyone else with this error which worried me. And rightfully worried I was because:

...as I said, over time, the Wii won't boot with the SD card inserted unless I restore my nand backup! But today things got especially hairy. I couldn't get bootmii to launch from boot2! Even with the sd card inserted and bootmii clearly on the SD card the Wii would just blink blue and nothing loaded. Finally it just booted. I'm not even sure how. But upon my first nand restore it froze! I thought I bricked by Wii. Then I couldn't get it to boot bootmii again, same issue with blinking blue light. I deleted config files, got a new copy of bootmii, and eventually was able to load it and restore my nand. Phew. Wii lives.

Now I'm back to square one. SD card channels sometimes are gray question marks and I know it's only a matter of time before I get a soft brick. But it's booting up reliably now.

I've tried multiple SD cards, reformatting, getting all new data, etc. Nothing seems to fix it. Is my nand failing?

What should I do? Any suggestions?

 

[gZa]

Sounds like SD card problems, maybe not the SD card but the internal reader?! Does everything work fine when you don't have a SD inserted. Can you test this with only a USB?

 

[DinohScene]

I would suggest looking into UNEEK.
It's a USB NAND redirector thing where you have a emulated NAND on a USB drive so to say.

 

[clandestine]

I would suggest looking into UNEEK.
It's a USB NAND redirector thing where you have a emulated NAND on a USB drive so to say.

I've tried to get this working so many times but I can't seem to get it to load. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I'm trying to use neek with USB loader GX and followed every guide on this forum. The guides written seem relatively straight forward. I've read through them again and again.

'm dumping my sysnand in USBGX. Easy. To USB:/nands/01 then I'm installing wads to the emunand. Then using modmii I'm generating the uneek+di files and copying them to the harddrive. I try to load neek in the features menu and just get a black screen that just hangs. I use a forwarder channel for USBGX but have been launching it directly from the homebrew channel in case that was the issue. I'm on r1281. I've also tried putting my emunand/neek on my SD card to no success using the sneek version of the program... It's driving me crazy and I must be overlooking something. I've spent hours trying to get it to work.

I'm on 3.0 r1281.

Post automatically merged: May 27, 2023

Sounds like SD card problems, maybe not the SD card but the internal reader?! Does everything work fine when you don't have a SD inserted. Can you test this with only a USB?

Yeah honestly I think it is a problem with the internal reader. I was trying to restore my nand back up and it wouldn't find the backup files on the SD card. Finally I pressed the sd card in passed its spring and it started restoring my sysnand in bootmii. Was nerve wrecking holding it in there while those essential files were copied.

I cleaned the reader out with a qtip and 91% alcohol and things functioned perfectly for months.... But now the problems I describe are happening again.

I have a Wii U laying around and might make the plunge to hack that to replace my Wii. I honestly just prefer the Wii's simplicity.