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→Powering on the thing
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Fortunately, back in the old days we could burn fakesigned discs, and boot them with no addition hacks (beyond a drivechip) — so we took the old Homebrew Channel Installer ISO and patched RealWnD into it, set the first 4 bytes of the image to ‘RAAE’, burned it, and tried booting it.+
[[File:Insert_Startup_Disc.jpg]]
[[File:Insert_Startup_Disc.jpg]]
−There’s a suspicious bit of code in the normal Wii’s System Menu — see BS2 states 9/10 — where it checks for a disc with the special ID ‘RAAE’. If it finds it, it refuses to load the disc — but by all other indications, this would be a valid Wii disc. This may have been the ID associated with the “Startup Disc”, and this check was placed in the final system menu to keep anyone from trying to use that disc a second time.
+There’s a bit of code in the normal Wii’s System Menu — see BS2 states 9/10 — where it checks for a disc with the special ID ‘RAAE’. If it finds it, it refuses to load the disc — but by all other indications, this would be a valid Wii disc. This was the ID associated with the “Startup Disc”, and this check was placed in the final system menu to keep anyone from trying to use that disc a second time.
−It is possible to boot RealWnD by changing the disc to the ID RAAE.
−To our delight, the screen faded to black, and RealWnD started up. This turned to frustration when I realized that the only way to start the program dumping was to navigate its menu using a Wiimote, and I had no way of syncing a Wiimote to this Wii without a working System menu. I (too-) quickly hacked GC pad support into the RealWnD code, burned it, booted it, and then watched it crash because I forgot to call PAD_Init(). A third try ended up working, and an hour later I had a NAND dump of an almost-unmodified Wii on my SD card.
+To our delight, the screen faded to black, and RealWnD started up. This turned to frustration when I realized that the only way to start the program dumping was to navigate its menu using a Wiimote, and I had no way of syncing a Wiimote to this Wii without a working System menu. I quickly hacked GC pad support into the RealWnD code, burned it, booted it, and then watched it crash because I forgot to call PAD_Init(). A third try ended up working, and an hour later I had a NAND dump of an almost-unmodified Wii on my SD card.
From there, it was fairly straightforward to proceed, though we probably did end up burning 10 discs trying to get the thing fully recovered to “normal” status. I burned the old “NTSC Semi-Brick Fix Disc” (with the first bytes changed to RAAE) to install system menu 3.2, then ran into problems trying to get the Hackmii Installer to work (it didn’t like the ancient versions of IOS installed on it) and I couldn’t get any games to play — even Zelda insisted on installing an update, which failed every time I tried! After using Bannerbomb to run Dop-MII to install a couple of newer versions of IOS and update boot2 (more later), I was able to install the rest of the standard channels with a normal Super Paper Mario disc, and then install BootMii as boot2 and dump the keys out so I could dump the keys to SD.
From there, it was fairly straightforward to proceed, though we probably did end up burning 10 discs trying to get the thing fully recovered to “normal” status. I burned the old “NTSC Semi-Brick Fix Disc” (with the first bytes changed to RAAE) to install system menu 3.2, then ran into problems trying to get the Hackmii Installer to work (it didn’t like the ancient versions of IOS installed on it) and I couldn’t get any games to play — even Zelda insisted on installing an update, which failed every time I tried! After using Bannerbomb to run Dop-MII to install a couple of newer versions of IOS and update boot2 (more later), I was able to install the rest of the standard channels with a normal Super Paper Mario disc, and then install BootMii as boot2 and dump the keys out so I could dump the keys to SD.