Wii-U NAND-AID - eMMC Recovery and Replacement Interposer Public Test

[eyeliner]

I just want to explain something as I believe there's some confusion as to why I've removed the "leg" with the castellated edge.

Let's look at this picture and pay close attention to the component inside the red box:

View attachment 364615

^ This is a 10V, 220UF electrolytic capacitor. Electrolytic capacitors of this size will most likely at some point require servicing. If we install the NAND-AID interposer on top of this capacitor's solder pad, we'll be unable to replace this component if it fails in the future.. We'd have to remove the NAND-AID QSB or butcher the board in order to remove/replace this capacitor, which isn't good.

Currently, you're going to have to solder the NAND-AID into position and then add the MicroSD card. This takes all of maybe 3 minutes to do and is very simple. I may find a different ground source, but ultimately, this is a much better solution in the long-run than using a weak electrolytic pad as both a ground and mechanical anchor.

Good reason to service the capacitor, then.

Do you have a video in the works? I personally am not worried about this, as my WiiU is from 2015 and is a Toshiba (I believe), but moving pictures would go a long way.

 

[bma37]

Dad is in the area, my wii u survived and slept, no picture, I will bring it back, good job

Post automatically merged: Apr 16, 2023

I have a wii u 32 g, after an update it bricked and only the black screen remains, I tried the recovery with the raspberry pi pico and memory card without success, I saw this project to replace the nand with a memory card, the The doubt is the following, do I need to make this board or can I do the same procedure by soldering the wires directly to the board and to the SD card?

 

[nickle241]

Dad is in the area, my wii u survived and slept, no picture, I will bring it back, good job

Post automatically merged: Apr 16, 2023

I have a wii u 32 g, after an update it bricked and only the black screen remains, I tried the recovery with the raspberry pi pico and memory card without success, I saw this project to replace the nand with a memory card, the The doubt is the following, do I need to make this board or can I do the same procedure by soldering the wires directly to the board and to the SD card?

you might not be in the situation you need this at all, do you know what emmc brand you have? if its not a hynix good odds you have a corruption brick instead of a failure brick... this could be good or bad, if possible try udpih and see if restoring the boot title works, but keep in mind that update related bricks tend to be fairly catastrophic, killing even fully stable hardware on a disturbingly regular basis back in the day and are potentially not recoverable at this time, but progress is happening on the software side to fix that too

ive got a fully dead hynix that im gonna need this for, but given that its fully dead i also need the software side

 

[bma37]

you might not be in the situation you need this at all, do you know what emmc brand you have? if its not a hynix good odds you have a corruption brick instead of a failure brick... this could be good or bad, if possible try udpih and see if restoring the boot title works, but keep in mind that update related bricks tend to be fairly catastrophic, killing even fully stable hardware on a disturbingly regular basis back in the day and are potentially not recoverable at this time, but progress is happening on the software side to fix that too

ive got a fully dead hynix that im gonna need this for, but given that its fully dead i also need the software side

It's a hynix, I took it apart and saw the mark

 

[nickle241]

It's a hynix, I took it apart and saw the mark

alright, fair enough, you might still be lucky and its just a mild corruption issue, not every hynix is confirmed to be dying, but yeah youre probably in the right place

 

[RetroBros]

**UPDATE**

FILES HAVE BEEN UPDATED.

For those who've been following some of my work, I've been designing an eMMC/NAND recovery/replacement Interposer for the Wii-U. This PCB is designed to fit cleanly into place on the Wii-U mainboard without requiring the installer to remove the BGA eMMC module. This tool allows you to more easily read/dump the existing eMMC as well as serving as an eMMC replacement via MicroSD.

View attachment 364135

The Wii-U NAND-AID is ready for public testing. Based on the feedback and data accumulated, changes will be made accordingly.

I'm going to ask of course that these not be re-uploaded or shared anywhere else. These are EVAL PCBs and aren't for public consumption. Tweaks/changes will be made based on community feedback so please document your testing in this thread. Again, this is a design in progress and the point of this public test is to resolve any issue and to put just a little more polish on the interposer.

The BOM is included within the zip file. These things are extremely cheap to make so it shouldn't cost hardly any money.

****ORDER THESE WITH A PCB THICKNESS OF EITHER 0.6MM OR 0.8MM AND INSULATE THE BOTTOM OF THE PCB****

The "DIS" jumper pulls the clock on the eNAND/eMMC to ground so that it's not floating. You'll want to keep this opened when dumping the eMMC and short it once you're finished with the original eMMC so that it has a defined logic state.

I don't have time to maintain a GITHUB for this, I just want to design this thing and get it out in the public so that people have a reasonably decent solution and answer for their NAND corrupt WIi-Us.

Thank you everyone.

Amazing Work! I hope this comes along. I imagine since it can use sd cards the nand size might be increased? That alone would make it a wow factor. Awesome idea!!!

Post automatically merged: Apr 18, 2023

**UPDATE**

FILES HAVE BEEN UPDATED.

For those who've been following some of my work, I've been designing an eMMC/NAND recovery/replacement Interposer for the Wii-U. This PCB is designed to fit cleanly into place on the Wii-U mainboard without requiring the installer to remove the BGA eMMC module. This tool allows you to more easily read/dump the existing eMMC as well as serving as an eMMC replacement via MicroSD.

View attachment 364135

The Wii-U NAND-AID is ready for public testing. Based on the feedback and data accumulated, changes will be made accordingly.

I'm going to ask of course that these not be re-uploaded or shared anywhere else. These are EVAL PCBs and aren't for public consumption. Tweaks/changes will be made based on community feedback so please document your testing in this thread. Again, this is a design in progress and the point of this public test is to resolve any issue and to put just a little more polish on the interposer.

The BOM is included within the zip file. These things are extremely cheap to make so it shouldn't cost hardly any money.

****ORDER THESE WITH A PCB THICKNESS OF EITHER 0.6MM OR 0.8MM AND INSULATE THE BOTTOM OF THE PCB****

The "DIS" jumper pulls the clock on the eNAND/eMMC to ground so that it's not floating. You'll want to keep this opened when dumping the eMMC and short it once you're finished with the original eMMC so that it has a defined logic state.

I don't have time to maintain a GITHUB for this, I just want to design this thing and get it out in the public so that people have a reasonably decent solution and answer for their NAND corrupt WIi-Us.

Thank you everyone.

Woah

 

[bma37]

I got a new wii u that stopped responding when turned off, I hope this one I can recover, has anyone tested the pcbs of Voultar?

 

[merlinoalexa]

good morning friends, if by chance someone could help me understand how I should go about solving my problem, I practically bought a Wii u from ebay, aesthetically new, it still had the protective films against scratches but when it is turned on, it has a black screen and a blue LED flashes

 

[BranBop]

For somebody who has never bought a custom PCB before (but has indeed soldered before), what customization options should I consider? Gerber is asking for length, width, surface finish, layers, etc.

Thanks so much for making this public! Us newbies are getting closer to success

 

[Voultar]

OK! I see a few people have spun these up! Let's see what happens when they arrive!

 

[SylverReZ]

OK! I see a few people have spun these up! Let's see what happens when they arrive!

I should get out my Wii U to do it, if only I can fix my gamepad without a new replacement screen being that expensive.

 

[Falloutgeek268]

I know this will basically replace the old nand but if the old nand is completely dead to where the console won't turn on can this recover the old memory and fix the problem? Also if someone has a picture in here for reference of what it should look like in the console after solder, could they share it?

 

[SDIO]

I know this will basically replace the old nand but if the old nand is completely dead to where the console won't turn on can this recover the old memory and fix the problem?

If the console won't start (black screen, solid blue led), because the old eMMC went read only it can help. If the eMMC is completely dead, which is unlikely, it won't help, except if you have a complete NAND backup.

 

[merlinoalexa]

Good Morning my Wii U instead has a black screen and the blue LED is flashing can it be recovered?

 

[Valery0p]

Good Morning my Wii U instead has a black screen and the blue LED is flashing can it be recovered?

Yes, using the de_Fuse modchip, assuming it's a corrupted MLC:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/de_fuse...lopment-by-shinyquagsire.630931/post-10139493
It's worth noting, any console with a blue light can be recovered to *at least* the functionality of an online-banned console or a devkit (unless it's blinking blue bc the DRAM is bad I guess lol, in that case you can at least pull the drive key and fix a broken drive Wii U). But if the light blinks blue, boot1 is booting which means OTP can be recovered.

If it's a red light (not blinking red, that means the power regulators are dead) it can maybe be recovered via spoofing a donor console, it honestly depends on what failed.

Granted, recovery from scratch is just in theory, there's a lot of work to be done on actually making clean NAND images from just otp/seeprom. But de_Fuse is basically the same as ntrcardhax on 3DS, as long as you have all of your backups you can make a full recovery from bad flashes and corruption.

ShinyQuagsire needs to streamline some of the software, but there's already one person with the same problem working on it.

 

[merlinoalexa]

Yes, using the de_Fuse modchip, assuming it's a corrupted MLC:

ShinyQuagsire needs to streamline some of the software, but there's already one person with the same problem working on it.

grazie mille per l attenzione rivolta

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Has anyone actually installed this in a console as of yet? Do we know if there are e.g. compatibility caveats with the SD card, matching the sizes, etc.? I remember SALT talked about MLC shrinkage back in the day but that would be a de_Fuse situation I think. ( cc @shinyquagsire23 ) Do we know if backups made in software work, or would they be missing ECC stuff?

I see that this board has connections to both sides of the CLK pad, do you still have to cut the trace under there? I remember this was an issue with manually wired hardmods.

I might order some of these soon (all my consoles are Samsungs, but I would like the easy flashing for development work); and minimum orders are usually 5, so if any AU folks are interested hmu. Do we know of any equivalent SD readers from a major brand that I might get from a DigiKey or the like? I did find the datasheet/footprint online.

 

[V10lator]

Has anyone actually installed this in a console as of yet?

This QSB? Yes, IIRC @Lazr1026 used one or two. Or replacing the eMMC with an SD card? Has been done by multiple people now.

Do we know if there are e.g. compatibility caveats with the SD card, matching the sizes, etc.?

Size must match. So far there was one size matched card which didn't want to work but might have been user error.

Do we know if backups made in software work

Yes, they do. Still hard- and software dumps have a size missmatch and we don't know what info the software dump misses (might just be unused stuff like eMMC boot).

do you still have to cut the trace under there?

Yes.

//EDIT: For the hard-/softdump: A hardware dump won't fit onto the SD card so no matter If hard- or software based dump: You'll always loose some bits. These bits seem to be unimportant through.

//EDIT2: Also don't forget the SLC cache: eMMC and cache contents need to match. So no matter how you get the MLC dump: You should not turn the console on after taking the dump. Only turn it on again after the eMMC had been replaced or you'll have to flash a matching SLC backup which requires special hardware and hours of time.

 

[LTRMars]

Good morning,
I have a wii u which turns on and where we have access to the menu except that I have an error when creating the mii and the nand is corrupt. I managed to dump the nand with udiph. I would like to know with the files to recover if we can redo a nand with the files of a wii u clean in order to inject the opt files inside.

THANKS

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

//EDIT2: Also don't forget the SLC cache: eMMC and cache contents need to match. So no matter how you get the MLC dump: You should not turn the console on after taking the dump. Only turn it on again after the eMMC had been replaced or you'll have to flash a matching SLC backup which requires special hardware and hours of time.

de_Fuse has patches for moving the cache to SLCCMPT, which makes me wonder if we can also just reset/disable the cache entirely with similar code.