A while ago, a friend of mine helped me exploit my Wii, so that I could run the Homebrew channel. There are many advantages to doing this, and for lots of reasons. Not just game piracy. Homebrew lets you install 3rd party apps on your Wii, which allow you to get some creative use out of the system. You can also connect USB storage to your Wii, and use it to store your games, so that you dont need to swap discs around when you want to play a game.

When we hacked the Wii, it was running update 3.6. I’d stopped updating the Wii from Nintendo’s update procedure because I assumed that they would probably tromp on my hacked wii, and restore the OS to its pristine condition, and I’d then have to go through re-hacking.

Well, I knew this time would come. I was forced into an update, so I could run the New Super Mario Brothers game. I guess it has something to do with the ability for the players to interact as they do in the game. So, i bit the bullet, and ran the update. It wasn’t until after i ran the update that i found a number of reports on the ‘net about how to update a hacked Wii, without actually running nintendo’s update. This would have kept my Homebrew intact, and still gotten me the update. But, oh well, I was committed at this point.

After some digging, I found a number of how-to’s on the subject of hacking a 4.2U Wii. 4.2U being the most recent update. I tried a number of them, and none of them worked. Until i found this how-to, which was SOOOOO much easier to follow than some of the others.

Since i’d been through so many other failed attempts at hacking this system, and since it was hacked once before, i decided now was a good time to backup my save data, and format the Wii’s system memory. Luckily, i was able to backup all of my save data to an SD card, and then save that data to my PC. I then performed the format, but wasnt able to put my save data back on the Wii until after i’d run each game at least once. This meant i either had to break out all of my discs, or get homebrew and the usb loader working before i could get my save data off of my sd card. So i started down the road to Wii-freedom. In the end, it wasnt all that difficult, and i ended up with bootmii, which is a more secure replacement for Wii’s boot2 loader, and the homebrew channel. I also have all of my USB capability back, and once i get all of my homebrew software reinstalled, i’ll have all of the functionality that i had before the format.

On top of all that, i can play Mario now. 😀