HackMii

ChipD has done a lot of work lately with the actual, physical NAND Flash chip on the Wii, and he just told me about his latest feat — two chips installed in one Wii, with a switch to toggle between them.  More pictures and info after the break.

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There still seems to be some confusion about why we turn our noses up at WAD-manipulation tools, so I think an analogy is in order.  A WAD Installer is like an ISO Loader.

Why?

WAD files and ISO files are very similar, in fact.  They are container formats (like ZIP files and TAR archives), which means they can contain all sorts of different things — some good and wholesome, some evil and foolish.  Unlike other containers, WADs and ISOs are generally used for self-contained, bootable content.  You know, like warez. [Read more →]

This post is part of a several-part series on fixing a “bricked” Wii:

• UnBrickMii – Introduction, explanation of a 4-part plan to unbrick any Wii
• amoxiflash – Part 1, a way to modify the NAND Flash of a bricked Wii
• Mario-Kart Autopsy 1 and 2 – Part 2, a (partial) analysis of what happens to the filesystem of a Wii to make it “brick”
• (tbd) – Part 3, a way to recover the necessary per-console unique keys (NAND AES, NAND HMAC) using a hacked boot2 on a bricked Wii
• (tbd) – Part 4, software to modify the contents of the Wii’s filesystem on a host computer, making use of those two NAND keys.

I’ve focused my recent energy and time into Part 4.  It’s turned out to be more difficult than I’d feared.  In order to modify the filesystem to unbrick a Wii, we need to do the following things: [Read more →]