Autopsy of a Mario-Kart brick (part 1)

May 8th, 2008, 18:50 Posted By: wraggster

News from Bushing:

I have a “bitch” Wii — a Wii that I use specifically for testing out NAND flash hacks. I bought it on eBay, and it came with a broken drive — not a modchip disaster, but an actual launch-day Wii with an expired warranty. It had never been connected to the network, and had only played 4 or 5 games — so it only contained IOS9. It’s about as close to a “virgin” Wii as I ever expect to see. (I’ll refer to this often as my “ios9wii”).

Before playing, I backed up all of the contents with my Infectus. I then booted a PAL copy of Mario Kart. It recognized the disc, and told me it needed to install an update. It started to update, but never finished — after about 30 minutes, I decided it was probably a lost cause, and power-cycled it. I was greeted with this, a slight variation on a theme:

I then dumped the flash again (90 mins), and then flashed back to the original dump (6 hours ). We can now compare the two to see what happened.

This may not be the best comparison possible, since so many other changes happened between IOS9 and IOS36 — if I need to, I’ll pick a different route to brick.

The easiest way to start is by extracting the contents of each dump — before and after — with Segher’s zestig utility. Then, we compare the two. We get:

There are so many new files in the mkart dump because it installed all of the new versions of IOS. Also, in the process, it moved some files (e.g. config.data). Titles 1-2 (System Menu), 1-100 (BC) and 1-101 (MIOS) were upgraded. These also placed files in /shared1.

We can safely ignore the WC24 stuff. We can also ignore the added tmds and tickets for the new IOS versions, and all the files associated with the upgrades for 1-2, 1-100, 1-101. The title directory for 48414b50 has no data or contents. The /tmp files are interesting, because it shows we were in the middle of an operation — more on that later.

It’s getting late and I’m tired, so I will have to continue this later. However, I do have some goodies for those of you that want to dig into this yourselves:

ios9wii dump skeleton (zip file)
mkart-bricked directory skeleton (zip file)

(Note, the above archives have some of the “content” files removed to avoid legal issues and to save on bandwidth. They aren’t relevant to this discussion, anyway.)

I’d welcome any theories as to what the specific problem is, based on the contents of those two zip files.

Here are the files I will be talking about tomorrow — take a look and see what useful data you can extract from them:
ios9_fs_metadatabin.bz2
mkart_fs_metadatabin.bz2
mkart-sffs.zip

Full details and files etc --> http://hackmii.com/2008/05/autopsy-o...io-kart-brick/

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